Minneapolis
Furniture is funny, absurd even. We cut down a living tree, shape and wrap the wood in the skin of a dead mammal, and then sit on it. Even if it’s an Eames chair on a pedestal in a museum, it’s hard to impart a sense of gravitas to an item designed to hold human butts. In “process invented the mirror” (on view through January 4, 2026), Jessi Reaves exploits the humor embedded in furniture and other domestic objects. Her first solo museum exhibition features 24 bold new sculptures and mixed-media works, nearly all of them made in 2025.
In previous work, Reaves focused on deconstructing iconic mid-century modern designs. Here, she’s remaking very familiar and recognizable readymade furniture from the ’80s, ’90s, and early aughts. She dismantles the wood, particle board, and caning of cheap pieces and reconstructs them with found-on-the-street and personal objects. The work pokes at ideas of function, beauty, gender, lifestyle, and class. It also calls into question notions of bad and good and the endless process of accumulation. Reaves maintains a laugh-out-loud sense of play and critical-minded humor through all of this.
The sculptural works are all installed in one room, set against a painted backdrop inspired by a Works Progress Administration mural. Made in collaboration with Minneapolis artist Whitney Terrill, Because the air is free—a grayscale rendering of abstracted laborers— establishes the tone of the show with its focus on labor, class, history, and obsolescence. The figures are stretched and distorted, reflecting the physicality of the sculptures themselves and suggesting the ways that things become warped over time through memory, politicization, or manipulation.
My eyes are down here (bachelor’s stool) riffs on the 18th-century bachelor’s stool, also called a Jefferson chair. A hyper-utilitarian piece intended for use by single men living in small spaces, the bachelor’s stool toggles between a step stool, chair, and ironing board. Reaves’s object is locked in the ironing board position, supported by an industrial-looking mechanism; the cross bar might be metal, but the rest is certainly wood painted to appear like metal at a quick glance. The sawhorse-style legs are covered in lengths of driftwood, some haphazardly coated in silver enamel, and ornamented with naked-lady-seated-from-behind reliefs—classic bachelor pad imagery. The flat top of the ironing board is wrapped in mesh-mounted wooden mosaic tile, edged with suede and ochre organza, white straps hanging from the sides, and topped with a lumbar pillow covered in narrative imagery. The whole ensemble suggests sex benches and BDSM horses, as well as multi-functional, though non-essential furniture pieces that end up stored in a closet alongside the holiday decorations. As the title suggests, My eyes are down here makes a wry feminist comment on the multilayered meanings of everyday objects, women’s bodies included.
Much of the material in these works, including cotton batting, velvet, sewing pins, mink fur, and hangers, points to classic markers of the domestic feminine. But Reaves’s approach to destruction and repurposing does not completely refute these themes and tropes; instead, it feels more like an acknowledgement and remixing. In an interview published on the Walker’s website (“What Makes an Object Bad? Jessi Reaves on Making Sculpture”), Reaves discusses how she will keep a component in her studio over time, so that it “…festers for long enough that it loses any sense of being special.” That’s exactly what the individual elements of her works are—nothing special. They are things that she finds on the curb, in an alley, things that anyone can find in a thrift shop or family storage unit. Reaves’s compo-nents are boring, cheap, and ubiquitous—much like traditional gender roles. This is precisely what makes her remixing so provocative.
Some sculptures are situated independently, but most are placed in tandem or in groups, an extremely effective curatorial move. The final groupings are the show’s most campy, narrative, and engaging. In the five-minute video Her job, which takes its cue from the WPA’s decorative arts program, a two-piece green skirt suit acts as the main character, moving through various landscapes and historic WPA-built interiors. The soundtrack consists of collaged audio taken from tv shows; phrases such as “passed down from grandparents,” “fabric is like the skin,” and many others help build a narrative around craft, material transformation, memory, and access. The video is presented inside Reflection in black plastic, an entertainment center covered in various strips of black leather and vinyl. Nearby, in Decoy world
(after Ruhlmann), small bird forms and figurines hide within layers of chiffon, poking their heads out of leather holes in what might have once been a side table. It’s a perfect reflection on our absurd domestic theatrics.