San Carlo Cremona is pleased to present Jessi Reaves, “Above the cold”. The sculptures in this exhibition are displayed on and around a large scaffolded structure. A crude facsimile of a modern house, dividing the space of the church into distinctive areas, those accessible and inaccessible. The sculptures make formal improvements on familiar objects but continue to offer a range of practical uses including storage, reflection and exhibition seating. The exhibition includes Reaves’ second video work to date titled “Reflects as one.” The video is shown on two custom monitors, part audio collage and part dramatic re-enactment. The dialogue is dubbed from the 2008 American movie “The Women” (a melodramatic re-make of the George Cukor directed 1939 film of the same name).
The familiar voices of the actresses have been cut and collaged; it creates the effect of a movie playing in the background and passively watching it. Perhaps you miss an important part of the plot and the movie takes on a new meaning in its absence. Reaves is known for her multi-faceted sculptural practice which approaches furniture as both material and subject, laying to waste the line between art and design, between functional and aesthetic. Her works bring forth the sense of possibility latent within the most mundane and ephemeral objects. Her treatment of material is never complicated, it is rough but deliberate, often highlighting and re-contextualizing the less refined surfaces that result from years of use or neglect. Reaves’ works collapse our sense of the object specific history, and play on these seemingly endless associations.
Jessi Reaves (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Art Club of Chicago; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield. Her work is in the collections of the Brandhorst Museum, Munich; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; among others.
