Living with design objects imparts a unique sense of possession, one distinguished from that of sharing space with a painting or sculpture. Works of applied art are less intimidating and imposing; they do not have to be admired at a distance for fear of fingerprints or dings. Functionality entails tactile appreciation and the pragmatic expectation that forms will age along with us. The masses of raw industrial matter, plywood, and bits of various fibers installed in this apartment gallery are conceptual domestic objects by Jessi Reaves and Sophie Stone, paired here to make a home complete.
In this Los Angeles debut for both artists, woven works by Stone, consisting of color-block-painted and deconstructed carpets resting either on the walls or floors, hesitantly engage with Reaves’s gutted, skinned, or skeletal chairs and shelves. The heavy structural bones and foam fat of Reaves’s Life is getting longer/baguette chair, 2016, appear to have left a line of entrails down the hallway—Stone’s Untitled (carpet with silk edge), 2016, featuring sewn and painted runny pinks, reds, and nudes on a carpet much too wide for the hallway where it lies. In the dining room, Reaves’s His and Hers Ferraris (Ignazio Giunti), 2014, a pair of delicate frame chairs, is enmeshed in an inner-cheek-hued, tissue-thin membrane pierced by blood-red arabesque tracings so delicate they could have been rendered with a scalpel. Patchwork palimpsests, lovingly worn and mended together, line the hearth in this visceral valentine to a corporeal home. It’s where the heart is.