The galleries of the Arts Club of Chicago are currently filled with objects resembling banquettes, étageres, armoires, sconce lighting, a side table, a modular shelving unit and more. All of it is sculpture, most of it can also be furniture and the difference between the two is an exciting place to spend some time — and maybe to sit down.
Jessi Reaves, the 37-year-old Queens-based artist who made the work on view in “All possessive lusts dispelled,” comes at the confusion of furnishing and artwork honestly. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, one of the craftiest cities in the country, she studied furniture design for a semester at the Rhode Island School of Design before taking some time off and then returning to focus on painting. Her jobs post-graduation included doing window displays, installing custom sculptures for the Syfy channel, working as a freelance upholsterer and laboring for a mid-century modern-style furniture maker.
Although her own sculptures could arguably find a home in avant-garde design settings like the annual Milan Furniture Fair, they are shown exclusively in fine art contexts, including the Whitney Biennial and Carnegie International. The one exception, when she collaborated with the fashion designer John Galliano to create usable backdrops for his 2018 spring couture collection, proves the rule. Contemporary art can be all sorts of things — food, environment, conversation, clothing, storage — but it often prefers to be recognized first and foremost as art.
“All possessive lusts dispelled” is Reaves’ first exhibit in Chicago, and it’s a terrific survey of the work she’s done since 2016, though I wish it included some of her experiments with polar fleece as an upholstery fabric for desk chairs and polyurethane foam as a veneer for shelving and an exposed structure for seating. My best guess as to why those works were excluded is their unsexiness. To take the exhibit title at face value, nobody’s lusting possessively after fleece- or foam-covered anything. Nothing to dispel there! But a tall, curvy shelving unit sheathed in tightfitting magenta vinyl with strategically placed zippers, partly undone as if to display cleavage? A long, lean ottoman enveloped in bruised silvery fabric, irregularly tufted and looking fit to burst in a few swollen areas? That’s some seriously risqué stuff. Other racy elements include hot pink tiger stripes decorating an enormous modular storage unit, sheer leopard print used in a wall lamp, beaded curtains dangling like locks of hair from the top of a shelving unit, punk fabric strapped to the shiny metal rods of a hanging rack, and spit-curl shelves and peekaboo doors on a wardrobe.
Not all of the 21 artworks on exhibit are literally erotic, but even those that aren’t contain something desirable. Mostly this is an element of high design, the kind of name-brand furnishings that those in the know might recognize: a Hans Wegner folding chair, Noguchi paper lamps, those cylindrical Kartell plastic side tables, Danish modern anything. These are the things design-conscious people covet in 2023, though mostly they buy reproductions, because who can afford the real thing? And who would know? Reaves might, and her Kartell units are legit, albeit discolored and dirty and suspended in a yellow beribboned coffin, but the rest of the design objects in the show are either found knockoffs or built from scratch. Even the banquettes, which look as if they were ripped out of a diner, were built to spec before being painted and delicately slipcovered, and the central shelving system, which could have been in my grandfather’s den, was constructed from a shipping palette, among other materials. Things are not quite what they seem.
Reaves knows her design history well enough, and when she copies, she samples from the best, including a fabulous Pierre Cardin lacquered armoire from 1980 with doors resembling the forewings of a beetle. “Dinner every night (Cardin knockoff cabinet #1)” must have been extremely difficult to make, but it’s also defiantly crude. The back panel is pieced together from dozens of mismatched offcuts, filled in with sawdust and glue, and held together by metal braces and screws. The doors are just stretchy fabric tied onto a wire metal frame. The paint and joints are clumpy. An office chair base holds it all up. Is it trashy or luxurious, good taste or bad? Hard to say.
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This deliberately shoddy level of finish is one source of the tension in Reaves’ sculptures, most of which have a junkiness that’s hard to take. You want them, but you also really don’t. Some parts are sanded or polished or neatly stitched, but plenty more bear pencil markings, rough edges, exposed hardware, falling-out stuffing and plain old dirt, as if they’ve just been plucked out of a dumpster. Two cupboards feature banged-up old car parts, left over from repairs done to the artist’s vehicle. A wall shelf contains within it a dusty old bamboo corner étagere, swallowed up by swirling cuts of plywood and a black-and-white checkered purse. Excess challenges restraint, while the functional tussles with the purposeless.
Speaking of purpose, did I sit? I regret to say I did not, though I am the kind of person who usually delights in putting on a Hélio Oiticica wearable, walking on a Carl André floor piece, sitting in a Mary Heilmann chair, eating a Rirkrit Tiravanija curry bowl or otherwise trying out anything I have ever been permitted to do in a gallery. But Reaves’ show continues through the end of May, so there’s time yet to take on her dare.
“Jessi Reaves: All possessive lusts dispelled” runs through May 20 at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario St.; more information at 312-787-3997 and artsclubchicago.org
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.