MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The Walker Art Center opened artist Jessi Reaves’s first solo museum exhibition, titled Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror. Reaves’s practice engages with the making and unmaking of objects, the labor of creation, and the interplay between functionality and absurdity. She begins with found and fabricated furniture objects, which she then modifies, dismantles, and improves upon towards a sculptural end. For her upcoming exhibition at the Walker, Reaves created a new body of work that draws upon a range of source materials, including those related to the Works Progress Administration and to figures in the Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and Japanese Post-Modernism movements. Together, the works highlight Reaves’s ongoing engagement with notions of value, nostalgia, and consumer culture. Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror will remain on view through January 4, 2026.

The exhibition features nearly 20 new sculptural works that reflect the artist’s characteristic style and that also see her embracing new materials and processes. The objects exist in the nebulous space between function and aesthetics as everyday objects like lamps, chairs, and cabinets are deconstructed and remade into new forms at once familiar and foreign. Many of the original pieces include moving parts, with doors, hinges, shades, and bulbs that underscore their functional origin. Through the process of transformation, these parts become fixed in space, losing the purpose of their movement while still allowing for different visual configurations.

The featured works are inspired by a breadth of sources, both global and personal. Several of the works incorporate collage techniques with birding magazines from the artist’s late mother. These collages are applied to the raw materials of the works—such as plywood and plexiglass. In this way, the sculptures contain an essential reference to adolescence and a spirit of adaptation. Other works in the exhibition engage with the creative output of Art Deco designer Paul T. Frankl, Art Nouveau designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and the Japanese Post-Modernist Shiro Kuramata’s Miss Blanc Chair. These references expand the historical movements and objects with which Reaves’s practice is in dialogue.

“I was initially drawn to Jessi’s work by its refusal to behave as sculpture or furniture as well as its lack of reverence for what most of us consider icons of design,” said Mary Ceruti, Executive Director and exhibition curator. “Jessi has an intense interest in design history as it co-exists in our daily environment with folk and vernacular forms. The work featured in the exhibition is rich with sculptural details that trigger sense memory and visual pleasure.”

Born in Portland in 1986, Jessi Reaves studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently based in New York. Her work has been showcased in numerous prestigious exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial and the Carnegie International, and is held in the collections of the Brandhorst Museum, Munich; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Walker, among others. Her work questions the notion that form follows function by creating pieces that transcend this boundary. Both playful and provocative, the hand-crafted sculptures are baroque and sometimes grotesque assemblages constructed from furniture, decorative items, material scraps, and other disparate materials.