Jennifer Wynne Reeves @ BravinLee Programs subjective review of The Worms in the Walls at Mondrian’s House.By Ola Manana
I walked into Bravin Lee Programs on the Saturday of the Art Fairs. Lucky for me, the room was quiet, and uninhabited, except for the co-owner John Lee,who was manning the desk at the entrance. The quiet provided the intimacy required to fully appreciate the astonishing work on display.
Every single work had the completeness of a song. The songs were strange. Prominent passages were as felt as a long note, rose and fell within the piece. Gradations of subtle midnight blues and blacks striated and streaked, dipped and peaked. Wires wove in. Whites whited out. Tiny animals popped up like groupings of notes. Sometimes, instead of animals, curious geometric figures appeared.
Far Away But Not Far Apart, 2013, 15 x 23 inches
In FAR AWAY BUT NOT FAR APART, two of these figures interact. One is a swash of black, white and phylocyanine green that peeps from the foreground. He is a wide brush stroke waving with something like a symbolic wire arm to another abstract guy made of white blobs stacked on top of one another like a skinny six ball snow man. The mood is ominous. The washy sky suggests a coming thunderstorm.The bridge, overtaking the central plain contains the white figure who looms above and at a distance from his tri-colored friend. An occasional wire is woven through the grid.The fragile reminder of metal deepens the surface both piercing it and hovering above it. The puncturing enlarges the depth behind the artwork and makes it larger. Instead of being cute,which is the danger with small colorful paintings of deluxe stick figures, it is more than that.It is heartbreaking because you know the snow guy can’t get to the color guy. Tiny, jubilant “arms” are raised in recognition of copacetic understanding. It is a memory of a time when the going was tough and a comrade waved friendship. Acknowledgement. Maybe even love. And that wave was enough.
Laughing at Snakes 2011 to 2013, acrylic, old frame and wire on panel, 32 x 11.5inches
Many of these paintings seem to be pretending to be paintings about painting. In UNEXPECTED BOOGIE WOOGIE, a poetic ode to abstraction is neatly penciled onto the painting. The painting is stuck flat in an ornately carved wooden frame that was whitewashed, along with the cardboard. Midway through the poem Reeves writes –“Jazz needs heat. Jazz has jaws.” It seems that the artist is using language in the same experimental way that she uses the material elements in her work. There is a rise, a fall, a web, a wire, a drip. The painting is surreal. Her ode to abstraction does not belong ON an abstract painting. She’s obliterated the lovely frame, yet included it. A pile of what appears to be empty lollipop sticks is stuck with dribbles of goldy brown resin to the “gutter” between cardboard and frame . The resin suggests melted candy that has been sucked off, spit out, and then stretched into the triangle on the left upper corner. Most unexpectedly, two hooks opposite each other are cranked into the front of the painting. A wire attached to each hook forms a vertical line. The tension between abstraction and figuration is stated implicitly in the poem. But I think it is just there to throw the viewer. Disinformation distracts from the trail of candy drool, the surreal symbols and whatever they mean.
Laughing at Snakes 2011 to 2013, crylic, old frame and wire on panel, 32 x 11.5 inches
Ms. Reeves paints like the memory of a dream. There is a constant interplay between vague and recognizable elements. She tricks or treats you with her surfaces. She’s the type that can’t be typed, the nut that can’t be cracked. She reveals and obscures vigorously and what is left is the interplay between doubt and conjecture, scribbling out and scribbling in.
In LAUGHING AT SNAKES, it seems as if her painting is threatening to burst into SCULPTURE. Again she makes use of a frame, as part of the painting itself, but does not even bother to fill the painting in. Instead, it appears Reeves has dripped pools of peachy paint on a surface, left them to dry and pulled up the creamy plastic shapes and arranged them just so in and around the frame. Nothing else is left to chance, its the collecting nesting bit of a busy pack rat. Not even the wire the piece is hanging from is left to chance. Instead of a utilitarian hanging purpose, this wire is festooned like a party hat upon the painting. There is something funny about it. It’s make believe second shift surrealism. Meaning is alluded to through abstraction. For me, the painting has anthropomorphized. It is flesh and skin. It’s the guy at the party that’s all fucked up with leis and crepe paper trailing behind him. No one wants to be him, but he doesn’t exactly want to be you, either.
I am enjoying my walk around the room. I like that I can’t figure out what Ms. Reeves is doing. What “school” she is participating in. I like that her paintings are stories about life and then stories about art. She’s obviously aware of the art historical context of her work. She knows of Eva Hesse, and Rauschenberg, and Beatrix Potter for that matter. None of these possible influences seem to have a hierarchy for her. If there is precedent to the articulation of paint, the type of stroke or family of color it has all gone through the Reeves wringer, and come out entirely hers. There is a story here. In fact there is a book attached to this body of work. A book of vignettes of perfect prose that seems to reflect the temperature of the paintings.
Bird Healer, 2012, gouache, wire pencil and hair on hard molding paste on paper, 12 x 15.5 inches
In BIRD HEALER, I am transported by a wild country scene. Baby blue, turquoise, and hurricane pink form the backdrop of the narrative. A couple of rifles have fired on a group of birds. Someone’s out hunting. A blast of powder blue feathers? smoke? rises in a frenzy to mingle with a cloud formation. A bird has been shot, midair. Another is hurrying away, but looking back. Schadenfreude. There is a dead one lying on the ground, and another wreath of limp feathers draped around the hand of what is apparently the Bird Healer. All of the drama is happening with the birds. The geese with their sketchy simplicity all have their row to hoe now. It is a time where everyone is in danger. The killing and the healing are happening at once. The healer stands melting in and out of the color fields. She is pink to cobalt violet, tall in relation to the scene. She can not be hurt by the bullets whizzing by. Instead she has become part smoke herself, a tottering stack of blocks that relies upon her own unbelievable form to weather life’s trials. She alone has bothered to retrieve the injured one. She’s barely a huddle of lines this one. But there’s hope. Amid all the action there is silence. The end of the story is suspended like the bird stranded, mid air. And I am left to do what humans do : fill in all the blanks so I can understand.
I can’t be sure if my story and the artist’s story go together. It is within the realm of possibility that the fantasies constructed from a tiny pile of hair, a button, a blob of paint that has been placed like a wad of gum, all of the stories I attach to the art are coming from me and have no bearing on the artist’s intent.
And that is why this work works for me. When I go inside it, enough room has been left for me to walk around and take what I need, as a viewer. In that way the work has succeeded by being both personal and universal. Specific but not didactic. Jennifer Wynne Reeves has suspended my disbelief in the rainbow stick figure. And I can imagine, he’s waving at me.
Ola Mañana © 2013, publishable by permission only.