Jessi Reaves

Zooming all about the dusty glass case is a curving line of rubber, a never-ending highway turn off to a mountain town. Cars approach with speed through a midday haze and passengers trail their shadows in a vicious circle.

With a beaded gate of iridescent stars, it has impressive modernist seats with curved arms and leather fabric. It has, on top of one such seat, a shelf with zebra-stripes that prevents anyone from sitting. Like a lewd garment, all along, there is embroidered appliqué glued flat and a drawing of a wasp humming irately and circulating.

The ground is knobby with the edges of wooden limbs covered in slipcover extensions, pouches, for their protrusions. A toppling pile of chairs clink together in top-to-bottom verticality. Their caning is broken from the weight of dinner guests in their past, held together with a smearing of sawdust and wood glue, what could otherwise be mistaken for ground brownie crumbs slathered in their broken weave. In the center rests a shoe rack covered in webbed gargoyle talons like claws from a rhinestone hair clip. When the island goes dark, lampshades click on. The full moon is reminiscent of reptilian shells, splintered into overturned parts.

Life is devoid of personal artifacts. There are no translucent shelves with heart-shaped peepholes, no rickety wheels, no erratically placed zip-ties, and no hollow cornucopia nearby. On the outskirts are rooms that have never held someone inside, never witnessed someone sitting on the edge of tempered glass. Never had a tabletop flip right-side-up, glass in the air like a seesaw, with the dead weight of a person sitting on one edge.

A sculpture on a plinth with a world carved inside, it is a stacked shelf with glass cells reminiscent of a shopping center. Stacked with differentiated quarters. Accumulated interiors that elude purpose. Where empathy lies in the mania. Where, in the work of Jessi Reaves, rawness is brought forward as a frontal face. A fact. Where the world combats its own functionality.

Jessi Reaves (b.1986) earned her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 2009. Her practice centers on furniture and sculpture, rupturing traditional binaries of the functional and the aesthetic. Reaves’ solo exhibitions include Kitchen Arrangement within The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); android stroll, Herald St, London, United Kingdom (2017); Jessi Reaves, Bridget Donahue, New York, NY (2016); Now Showing: Jessi Reaves, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Eckhaus Latta: Possessed, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2018); SI Onsite, Swiss Institute, New York, NY (semi-permanent installation beginning 2018); Ginny Casey and Jessi Reaves, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (2017); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2017); Looking Back/ The 11th White Columns Annual, White Columns, NY (2017); Dolores, Team Gallery, New York, NY (2016); Outside, Karma, Amagansett, NY, September (2016); Gallery Share, Off Vendome, New York, NY, (2016) among others. In 2017, Reaves received a Special Mention for the Hublot Design Prize in Switzerland. Her work is in the public collections of RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI and The Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY.