LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

REVIEW

Tiny Guides on the Last Adventure: Doll Play in the Work of Jennifer Wynne Reeves

By Miyoshi Barosh

August 21, 2015

Jennifer Wynne Reeves "Untitled (Spiritual Ejaculation)," 2011

Jennifer Wynne Reeves, Untitled (Spiritual Ejaculation), 2011, mixed media on archival inkjet print photo, 13″ x 19″

Abstraction catches my hand in hers; I can feel she’s there, hot with ideas, a spool of suggestions, the answer for a painting, a perfectly unexpected Boogie Woogie.

— Jennifer Wynne Reeves, Soul Bolt, 2012 

IN APRIL, 2014, two months before she died of cancer at age 51, artist Jennifer Wynne Reeves posted this notice to members of the “beautification committee,” as she referred to her followers on Facebook: 

WELCOME invention, preserve our Klingon fight, admire our grooved foreheads and dog teeth. It will keep us alive for longer than is thought possible. Over a hundred years ago, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, ‘We must look deep into realism instead of only accepting the outward sense of things.’ Beautiful. Making and buying art for the market place is the same as dumping the warp core; bad for the star ship Voyager; bad for those warring Klingon AbExers. Don’t worry. We can do it again. Visuals are exceedingly variable, each one a mathematical equation, reproducible, logical, Vulcan, spiritually relevant and applicable to the limits of paint.

“Grooved foreheads and dog teeth” describes cancer’s alien countenance: an irrational killing machine that has broken through the body’s defenses at warp speed. The phrase reappears in the title of a recent exhibition of two bodies of Reeves’s work, “A Bolt of Soul: Grooved Foreheads and Dog Teeth,” on view at CB1 Gallery in downtown Los Angeles from June 6–July 18, 2015. As co-agents of the Reeves’s archive with BravinLee Programs, CB1 showed a selection of small paintings from 1997 as well as a larger, more recent group of abstract paintings and various works on paper, all made in the year before Reeves passed away. Despite a buoyant spirit and quiet comic presence, the tendency for melancholy and — particularly in the earlier work from ’97 — reference to American folk art (and its somber color palette) casts a shadow over the exhibition.

Reeves had survived cervical cancer in 2005, loosing both her ovaries, before being diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, known as The Terminator, the most aggressive and common form of brain tumors and one that has also proven resistant to therapeutic interventions. Starting in January 2012, Reeves endured three operations to remove the tumors from her brain. She continued to paint throughout her battle against cancer, using symbolic imagery to form meaning from her experience and as means to articulate and sublimate the emotions between diagnosis and death into her own Endgame.

In an interview with Julia Schwartz in Figure/Ground (March 1, 2013), Reeves spoke of watching skaters in the Winter Olympics, saying they were immaterial, “pure lines, nothing but lines.” Against figurative convention, she similarly depicts the anxieties and experiences of life with cancer through abstraction and symbolism. Composed of awkwardly twisted contortions of wire and paper, Untitled (Spiritual Ejaculation), (2011) evokes a large angry erection letting loose a whimsical lasso of color in defiance of gravity — embodying a sense of “gleeful saturnalia” (Jenny Diski, “A Diagnosis,” Sept. 11, 2014, London Review of Books). (For Jung, “the phallus always means the creative mana, the power of healing and fertility.” [Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 16, 1966] The image explodes with rude creativity while the photographed highway gives a distanced perspective along the journey’s lonely road, reminiscent of Thelma and Louise discovering their freedom, driving into their own wild sunset before reality slammed into them, head on. In her self-published 2012 book, Soul Bolt, Reeves wrote:

Orgasm arrives when the mind finally lets go of its grip on the body, its imprisonment in matter, its resistance to art, until the painting is completely open-ended. A spirit-ward cum is delivered. I walk away from the picture on the wall, my heart seeded.

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