Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror

The Walker Art Center presents artist Jessi Reaves’s first solo museum exhibition, titled Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror.  Reaves’s practice engages with the making and dissection of objects, the labor of creation, and the interplay between functionality and absurdity, among other concerns. She begins with found and fabricated furniture objects, which she then modifies, dismantles, and improves upon toward a sculptural end. For this exhibition, Reaves created a new body of work that draws from a range of source materials, including those related the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and to figures in the Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and Japanese postmodernism movements. Together, the works highlight Reaves’s ongoing engagement with notions of the handmade, value, and consumer culture.

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1986, Reaves studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently based in New York. Her work has been showcased in numerous prestigious exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial and the Carnegie International, and is held in the collections of the Brandhorst Museum, Munich; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Walker, among others. Both playful and provocative, her hand-crafted sculptures are baroque and sometimes grotesque assemblages constructed from furniture, decorative items, material scraps, and other disparate materials.

“I was initially drawn to Jessi’s work by its refusal to behave as sculpture or furniture as well as its lack of reverence for what most of us consider icons of design,” said Mary Ceruti, Executive Director of the Walker and exhibition curator. “Jessi has an intense interest in design history as it coexists in our daily environment with folk and vernacular forms. The work featured in the exhibition is rich with sculptural details that trigger sense memory and visual pleasure.”

Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror presents approximately 20 new sculptures and a video work within an installation featuring a large-scale mural and curtain. At once familiar and foreign, many of the original pieces include moving parts, with doors, hinges, shades, and bulbs that underscore their functional origin. The featured works are informed by a breadth of sources. Specific sculptures engage with the creative output of Art Deco designers Paul T. Frankl and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann and the Japanese postmodernist Shiro Kuramata. These references expand the historical movements and objects with which Reaves’s practice is in dialogue.  The artist’s mural, based on a WPA-era mural, creates a quasi-historic environment that sites the sculptures in a different yet ambiguous time and place, and invites a reflection on how we value artists’ labor.

Curatorial team: Mary Ceruti, Executive Director; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts

Exhibition sponsors: Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror is made possible with support from the Edward R. Bazinet Charitable Foundation and RBC Wealth Management. Additional support is provided by Marguerite Steed Hoffman, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, and Sarah Miller Meigs.x