Philadelphia
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
In Jessi Reaves’s recent exhibition, her sculptural furniture was integrated both formally and functionally with a group of surreal still-life paintings by fellow New Yorker Ginny Casey. Curator Charlotte Ickes described these complementary bodies of work as “two solo exhibitions.” The juxtaposition with Casey’s intensely colored paintings of unfinished objects and hovering body parts set in cavernous ateliers placed Reaves’s work within a context of conversations about the artist’s studio and the erotics of the psychoanalytic part-object. A pair of green plastic gardencenter chairs, Chair 1 and Chair 2 (both 2016), faced viewers at the entrance to the exhibition. These two chairs were once one–the original had been roughly split in two, its spine and ribs built out and repaired using sections of driftwood and highly patterned fabric …see the entire review in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.
