From October 7 through December 22, 1999, the Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia will present the work of Daniel Reeves, a video and multimedia artist. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Virginia Film Festival and its 1999 theme TechnoVisions and Reeves will also present work as part of the Festival's program. The Museum exhibition is made possible with the support of the University's Arts$ Program and Arts Enhancement Fund and generous equipment loans from Crutchfield.
The public is invited to an opening for the exhibition in the Bayly Art Museum on Thursday, October 7, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. At 8:00 p.m., Reeves will screen his video Obsessive Becoming in Campbell Hall Room 158. Parking is available in the Culbreth Theater lot, and both events are free.
Born in 1948 in the U.S., Daniel Reeves began his artistic career as a video artist, producing his first work, Thousands Watch, in 1979, shortly after graduating from Ithaca College with a B.S. in cinema studies. Prior to attending college, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and was wounded in action in Vietnam, one of the few in his platoon to survive an ambush at the beginning of the Tet Offensive of 1968. He has traveled extensively in India, France, Kenya, Japan, and Thailand in his exploration of other cultures. Reeves is a National Endowment for the Arts and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a four-time recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts' Creative Artists' Public Service Program Award.
From his earliest pieces on video to his present work, which now includes sophisticated installations, prints, and paintings, Reeves has produced formally complex and aesthetically and technologically layered works that explore and resolve his personal experiences with violence as well as the twentieth century's legacy of destruction and genocide. Through his emotionally searing, intellectually rigorous, and strikingly beautiful images, he aims to provide witness to the cycle of violence. Reeves forgoes narrative conventions in favor of multisensory experience, which itself becomes a metaphor for the interconnectedness of life. He finds hope in the seemingly hopeless, potential and significance in the moment.
Featured in the Bayly Art Museum exhibition Daniel Reeves: Above Memory and Transformation are the following works:
Eingang (The Way In), 1990-99
Commissioned by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and inspired by a poem of the same name by Rainer Maria Rilke, Eingang literalizes the tensions between nature and technology, placing ecological issues into an ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic framework.
The work consists of a mandalic arrangement of seven video screens embedded in sections of a 350-year-old Rocky Mountain Fir, each ranging in height from 25" to 49". High-definition color video monitors are recessed with their glass screens flush with the wooden surface. Smooth shore pebbles, placed atop the monitors, soften the edges of the screens and create organic shapes.
The video on the monitors takes its title from a poem, Try To Live To See This by the North Indian poet Kabir, selected, says Reeves, "because essentially what Kabir says is, 'Try to live to see something that is not presented to you in ordinary reality.' That could mean looking at a leaf floating in a pond and suddenly seeing it in a totally new light." Centered in these fields of shifting light and color are crystal bowls filled with water, each of which holds a rice-filled glass bowl. The vessels, evocative of Buddhist offerings, contain miniature televisions nestled in the saffron-colored rice. The small screens are tuned to commercial broadcast programs.
End to End, 1999
End to End is a video painting employing DVD-ROM playback and a flat plasma screen. Slowly and subtly, the electronic painting — its figures, objects, and landscape — undergoes a metamorphic transition over a period of seven hours. The work, notes Reeves, "is a millennial allegory inspired directly by three sources: the Haywain triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, The Resurrection at Cookham by Stanley Spencer, and a 1964 poem by Czeslaw Milosz entitled "They Will Place There Telescreens":They will place telescreens there and our life will be appearing from end to end with everything we have managed to forget, as it seemed, forever."
Digital Prints and Paintings, 1997-99
These IRIS and Lamda prints are digitally printed on linen, canvas, and acid-free paper as ink jet monochromes, then worked by hand to create layers of color with oil sticks and a variety of other media, including letter stamps and gold leaf. The content, notes Reeves, is empowered and shaped by the same concerns and passions present in all his work: "the confluence of history, memory, and the legacy of violence and denial that has plagued our century ... I have always felt compelled to involve the power of testimony and witness in the work and have struggled to explore and reveal the true transformative value of art."
The work presents the viewer with the possibilities of new narratives and provocative questions through the use of a visual form whose potential and complexities are intriguingly explored. The deliberate touches of oil stick, paint, and other material create an unfinished look that evokes a range of reactions — emotional, intellectual, psychological, and even spiritual.These digital paintings are a dramatic shift for Reeves, who has spent the last twenty years producing single and multi-channel time-based video works. He views this project not as entirely new but as "the culmination of over fifteen years of intense exploration with still and motion digital imaging on all platforms." Digital painting is also a return to Reeves' experiments of the mid-1970s, when he used photo oils and dyes to manipulate and transform his own photographs.
Asylum
This enigmatic song of praise to the refuge of water will be shown as a large black-and-white daylight projection in the main stairwell of the Bayly Art Museum. The work will change several times during the show.
For more information and photographs, please contact the Bayly Art Museum at 804/924-3592.
Daniel Reeves is an artist-in-residence at the University of Virginia and is available for interviews until November 5. Toward the end of October, he will create two new works with students at the University as part of the annual Arts Board project.
