Artist:

Jessi Reaves (born 1986, Portland, OR; lives and works in New York).

Description:

Marcel Breuer chair combined with an outdoor reclining chair, bound in newspaper print fabric.

For her solo show at Herald Street Gallery (London) in 2017, titled Android Stroll, Reaves presented sculptures that midcentury ergonomic furniture with bulky, heavy, impractical materials.

“Reaves enters an almost exclusively male domain of artists who have worked with furniture to challenge the fixed binaries of design and fine art. Isamu’s Noguchi’s iconic modernist coffee table, created for Herman Miller in 1947 and described in the original catalogue as “sculpture-for-use” and “design for production”, has been a particularly significant point of reference. And yet Reaves brutally re-imagines this and other such hallowed relics of modernist furniture, fetishised as art objects in design history. By combining such “art objects” with unrefined industrial materials and objects that many of us might describe as junk, she transgresses their codes of elegance and good taste to create a new idiosyncratic language. […]

In a similar way, the chair titled The History merges high and low junk, combining the skeleton of an outdoor reclining chair with the seat of Marcel Breuer’s famed Long Chair. The fabric that binds these two forms together is a knock-off version of John Galliano’s brazen newsprint dress for Dior, which was covered with sensational headlines from the news stories of his sullied reputation.”–Jessica Freeman-Attwood, Mousse Magazine