Uncertainty isn't a problem to solve
Jackie Reeves on painting "Big Plans" in "Larger Than Life – Drawings in Time," her solo show at Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Jackie Reeves started work on her expansive painting Big Plans, now on view in her solo show Larger Than Life – Drawings in Time through July 19 at Provincetown Art Association and Museum, as she studied for her citizenship exam in 2020. COVID had put us all in isolation. George Floyd was murdered in the streets of Minneapolis, igniting protests around the country. The U.S. was facing another election. It was a time of upheaval, and that upheaval is still underway.
Big Plans is an allegory of creation. Whether a painting or a more perfect union, the project always turns out stickier, darker, and more problematic than the plan. That foray into the unknown isn’t simply what Jackie depicts here. It seems to be a central tenet of her life. Her description of her process with Big Plans suggests that she savors the stumbling blocks and the dark periods, which in time open to flow and light.
Jackie was raised by architects. The framework of “plan, process, product” as a template may be built into her thinking right alongside playfulness with space. The works in Larger Than Life – Drawings in Time strike a magnetic balance between space and figure. The figures grab the viewer and attempt to define the terms. But the hazy, blotted spaces they move through and map are deep, less identifiable, and more like our own porous inner worlds. More like the fluidity of creation itself.
In Big Plans, which is more than 13 feet across, the dogged life-sized women are airy, made from blue and white just like the inchoate space from which they’re trying to carve out meaning or structure. Maybe they are just as much figment as figure. We’re all aswirl. We make a painting, and the painting makes us. That goes for both artist and viewer.
While she’s in the studio, Jackie jumps back and forth between real space and rendered space. She acts as her own model, recording her body in motion. She works on sculptures to open her brain into a more three-dimensional lane of thought, and she builds her painterly space right off the picture plane. It’s all malleable and constantly changing as the artwork guides her to its own making. Not unlike that more perfect union we continue to work toward in the midst of grave uncertainty.
Jackie writes:
