Presences: Paintings by Veronica Reeves
Reception: Aug. 9, 6-8 pm, 2018
922 SW Yamhill St, Portland, OR 97205
Hours: Monday – Saturday 10-6, Sunday 11-5
Free and open to the public.
In paintings in the traditions of surrealism and abstract expressionism, Veronica Reeves examines the way consciousness exists in layers of emotion, thought, domestic spaces, digital spaces, and wild spaces, questioning the construct of separation. Reeves’s paintings depict figures interacting with landscapes that seem familiar but are unrecognizable, absurd, and dreamlike. Through saturated colors, inverted colors, juxtaposing hard edges with spills, brushwork, and spray paint, Reeves creates visuals of an imaginal realm that reflects our world.
Reeves received her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015 and her BFA from Colorado University at Denver in 2008. She has shown her work nationally and internationally including New York City, Portland (Oregon), Denver, Seattle, Tokyo, and Berlin. Outside of her studio practice, Reeves co-organizes and art shows with Dispersal Collective and Danma vs. V2R2, an artist collaborative. Reeves has had residencies with Signal Fire Arts, Rainmaker Artist Residency, Leland Ironworks, and co-directed Next Gallery in Denver, an artist cooperative gallery. She was an artist-in-residence at Otto Petersen Elementary school during which she co-coordinated a permanent tile-mural project in collaboration with students and staff.
I am interested in the ways in which we create ourselves in relationship to our environment with particular regard to the way we interact with the Earth directly versus the intermediaries that technology and industry become. Painting connects me to an ancient lineage of observation and intuition. By incorporating abstraction, I invite the viewer to invoke the matrix of imagination while at the same time dampening limitations on the identity of figures and landscape.
