Of the various names of beauty we have touched, hozho is the most comprehensive, which we might explain by saying the Navajo way of life is aesthetic at its base. But we also should simply say that beauty is not, for the Navajo, an aesthetic concept: it’s not primarily about the way things appear — though it includes the universe as a whole. It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all of these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state.
-Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty, 2004.

At her memorial service earlier this month I found myself thinking about Jennifer Wynne Reeves and hozho, with its implicit moral imperative. It struck me that Jennifer lived, made and wrote in a state of hozho.  Minutes after I had this thought the woman with the guitar started to sing a Navajo song about peace all around us which became a singalong to close the beautiful and elegant service to this woman’s singular life and work. The nearest English equivalent would be to say that Reeves lived a life bathed in Grace.

Reeves anthropomorphizes abstraction in an ultimately humane way, abstracting emotion in the way Pina Bausch does in her choreography. The Garden of Gethsemane (2014), with its off-white picket fence, and its multicolored abstract striped figure, reminds me that in the suburbs no one can hear you scream.

Jonah (2012) has a series of lumps of an Autumn palette forming a figure with wire arms in a gesture of either helplessness or praying — the two go together — facing away from the gaping red maw of a giant fish. It is archetypal in its appropriately named biblical theme.

Place (1997) drives home the impasto and materiality of Reeves’ work that does not show up in reproduction on Facebook, where I became one of her followers and a commenter on the long threads accompanying her art and her writing. I didn’t understand her work well on Facebook – it was over my head – but when I went to the opening of her memorial show at BravinLee and saw it for the first time in all its material glory, it went straight to my heart.

Place has a heavily impastoed cake form in black with white frosting accompanied by equally dimensional blobs in sky blue and sea green stacked into a figure. Kym Ghee, my Facebook friend who met me at the show, said all of her paintings were delicious and edible with something uncomfortable taking place underneath. No painting illuminates this principle more than Place.

Klee and Arp were designated the humorous painters of the time by art critics. I would add Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. But their humor is not lacking in gravity. People err when they think of life as pure tragedy, for they will become melancholics, or of life as pure comedy, for they will become clowns. Life is both tragic and comic at the same time. Reeves shares with these artists a sense of the tragicomic.

Among her contemporaries she belongs with Thomas Nozkowski, Stephen Mueller and Jonathan Lasker to the genre of narrative abstraction. Mueller and Lasker the most: Mueller for his spirituality and early Lasker for his symbolism. Lasker was the Forrest Bess of the TV Generation. Reeves’ work shares this spirituality and symbolism.

Come walk in hozho with the work and writing that Jennifer Wynne Reeves has left behind.

BravinLee programs is at 526 West 26th Street #211, New York City, 212 462 4404

The post Bathed in Grace: The Life and Work of Jennifer Wynne Reeves appeared first on artcritical.

When I went to David Brody’s show at the Boiler — the project space of Pierogi Gallery — I was at first nonplussed. Things would have been clearer if I had read the quote at the beginning of the projected animation, the main feature of his installation, which is taken from St. Teresa of Ávila: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at times into my heart, and did pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and leave me all on fire with the love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

My first impression was one of annoyance at how flat the piece looked compared to other 3D animations of Brody’s that I had seen, and that the yellow was too light to indicate shadows.

But as the deep breathing at the beginning of the film took its effect, relaxing my body into a meditative state, I soon saw this animation as absolutely flat and yet three-dimensional at the same time. I marveled at how Brody could stride that tightrope with such assuredness. “In the animation 8 Ecstasies,” he writes, “two longstanding pipe dreams of mine came together: making a moving drawing, and pushing uncanny correspondences between sound and image as far as possible.”

The soundtrack established itself right away as something really original. The music, by experimental video artist Zig Gron, who also has Hollywood credits to his name as a music editor, including all three of The Matrix films, is a vital component of this piece. Gron’s soundtrack went seamlessly with Brody’s animation, articulating the way the flat lines and three-dimensional ridges separated. A very sudden and drastic shift in the ridges was accompanied by the sound of an earthquake. Gron sampled obscure tunes I did not know that added appropriately exuberant joy to 8 Ecstasies. I came away at the end with the impression that I had seen a masterpiece.

Brody had met Gron when they were both students at CalArts in the 1980s. After viewing 8 Ecstasies I watched the time-lapse animation of his drawings; the animation was projected high up against a brick wall, while the drawings themselves were to be found in a foyer-like space at the Boiler’s entrance. Brody’s drawing constitutes a halfway mark between his paintings with their dense architectural allusions, on the one hand, and his straightedge renderings in black and white, to be found in his animations, on the other. There was something (ironically) unruly in the ruled lines and certainly the background was pure gesture. The time lapse of the drawing had the pure pleasure of ones I have seen of flowers speedily unfolding. I was fascinated to see how his drawings were made. (The drawings, printed in editions of 15, come on a thumb-drive of 8 Ecstasies inserted into their frame, as well as a video of that particular drawing being drawn.)

The untitled orange-red sculpture, a ziggurat construction suspended from the Boiler Room’s high ceiling veiled by draping swathes of bubble wrap, had an apparitional impact like seeing a ghost in a haunted house. I had never seen a sculpture by Brody before, and yet it immediately held the force of another masterpiece in his oeuvre. I should qualify this statement with the admission of not being especially devoted to his paintings, which hitherto has been his primary means of expression.

One other piece should be acknowledged as part of the production of this multi-media exhibition, the newsprint catalogue with a text by Nick Flynn titled [salvaged process notes for david brody’s 8 ecstasies]. Culled from Brody’s notes to 8 Ecstasies, Flynn’s piece reads as a stand-alone poem.

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