Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • FLASH FEED
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

#329 Feb–Mar 2020, Reviews

29 January 2020, 12:19 pm CET

Jessi Reaves Herald St / London by Alex Bennett

by Alex Bennett January 29, 2020
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
“Going out in style.” Exhibition view at Herald St, London, 2019. Photography by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London.

Jessi Reaves’s New outfit standing container (all works 2019) is a darkling. Three antilopine console legs support an upturned, cankered carapace of blood-crusted contours; two of the supporting feet are folkloric pincers or scorpion tails that buttress the evening attire of a clingy brown fabric, whose insatiable slashes ensnare attention. Displayed in the window atop a carpeted, eggshell-gray ziggurat, New outfit declares: presentation.
Reaves’s chimeric furniture-sculptures perform pirouettes on observer and object; their twirls of deconstruction reassemble iconic or pedestrian design, pulling scavenged material into its whorl. While previous pulpy, Flinstonean forms were jury-rigged by chew-bones of wood, stapled foam, or stretched patchwork, the limning of simmering abjection or corporeal charm appears to have given way to something with more sheen.
What is this something? Style, perhaps. Surplus character. The tiered carpet sections the exhibition in two; the remainder is populated with recalibrated chairs, tables, and sconces. Mantlepiece Sconce equips dismantled Isamu Noguchi Akarilamps with slogan T-shirts: “Stop and smell the rosé” reads one (achieving a weird aura of sizzling adolescence). A stretched canopy of leopard print is skewered by poles that create support systems for tentacular lights and glass teardrops. The glinting dewdroppery still preserves Reaves’s cacophonous hazard-play. This moment of sheen may just be a performative gloss: her doughy wood glue reinforces joints or blares into the “zombie cucumber” of tricksy datura flowers.
To go out in style rings of a death knell, and these works collectively oscillate between performative fashioning and a seeming acceptance of a last hurrah, acquiescing to preservation. Three bowl table supports bowls beneath a glass surface, with curved padded chairs that are themselves ensconced and sutured to the table’s arrangement. The work screeches reservation with gritted teeth. Similarly, Scrap jacket chair is placed atop a crimson plinth as though in anticipation of museological freezing.
The recess of Reaves’s tiered carpet frames the obsolescent fireplace; it’s a neat trick, which perversely reifies the surrounding sculptures, however baroque their inoperability. In their display of a conclusive glittering chain of progress — their strudel folds, melting drips, and lacerated holes of proud ellipses — these objects suggest an embrittled civilization’s swan song.

 

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Alex Bennett

WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE Mining the American suburban fantasy through a widely varied output, Olivia Erlanger expands the limits of sculptural thinking

10 February 2020, 8:00 am CET

Olivia Erlanger politely asks me to hold the call while she scrolls diligently through her screen cap folder. The lengthy…

Read More

Hans Haacke New Museum / New York

29 January 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Spread across four floors and spanning six decades, Hans Haacke’s retrospective at the New Museum — his first museum show…

Read More

Trisha Donnelly Matthew Marks / New York

4 February 2020, 6:13 pm CET

In 1974, the CIA green-lit a 350-million-dollar cover-up operation to salvage a sunken Soviet sub from the depths of the…

Read More

Nam June Paik Tate Modern / London

4 February 2020, 8:00 am CET

Tate Modern’s Nam June Paik survey is zeitgeisty — immersive and Instagrammable, like Olafur Eliasson’s concurrent show in the Switch…

Read More

  • Next

    Kendell Geers Goodman Gallery / Johannesburg

  • Previous

    Marta Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books: A Living Elevation of Social and Cultural Relations

© 2023 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us