When Justine thought of her childhood with [her parents], she thought of the shoe boxes of colour photos stored in a living room closet in their Deer Park, Michigan, home. As an adult, Justine used these photographs as a set of icons, talismans against her fear that there had been something unusually nasty about her childhood. She would take the photographs out of their shoeboxes and vinyl albums and arrange them in bouquets that spanned the floor before her as she hunched near the radiator, holding her white-socked feet for warmth as she brooded over these proofs of family happiness and genetic beauty.

She could find nothing to link the charming world represented by her little photographs with the squalid, sweaty-pantyhose situation that became her adolescence- even though the pictures taken of her adolescence recorded a smiling, vulgarly pretty, confident young girl surrounded by friends wearing white lipstick and flowered miniskirts, her handsome, bemused parents in the background. Justine hated to look at these pictures, which, in her eyes, had the queasy, urgent, side-tilted quality of a dream that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Her earliest memories though, weren’t as clear, and she was thus completely seduced by the bright old photos.

From ‘Two Girls, Fat and Thin’, Mary Gaitskill, (1988, Simon & Schuster)

Exeter Phoenix is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent works by Laura Reeves, an artist who has recently returned to live in Exeter, having grown up in the city before living and working in Wales in the intervening years.

Reeves employs a process of collecting, researching and reviving histories from the recent past, creating idiosyncratic archival materials that aim to give them new relevance, drawing them out into the present. Found images  - such as photographs, 35mm slides and postcards – either from her personal and family collections, or else discovered by chance or unearthed, often in charity shops, are brought together with segments of autobiographical narrative and personal observation. Themes of nostalgia, origin and veracity are explored with a mixture of humour and pathos as she foregrounds the intimate, personal and domestic, revealing small moments of commonly shared experience.

Her work often teases at the nature of creative practice, exploring the cusp between the hobbyist, the amateur and the professional artist. She prods at her own chosen career, sometimes setting it against a sense of thwarted artistic ambition in her own family.

In one of several new works made for the exhibition, Reeves presents a series of close-cropped, photographs of her mother, which she has selected from family albums as the most candid and natural looking images she could find. Taken by her father (himself a keen amateur photographer) in the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, these black and white images - scanned, cropped and enlarged to the edge of integrity – each focus in on her mother’s facial expression. They are accompanied by an audio narration that responds to the images and to recent interviews about them with her mother.  A bouquet of cut flowers from her parents’ garden is placed nearby, replaced weekly throughout the exhibition, suggesting ideas around temporal beauty against a reflection on a period when the means of making photographs first became widely affordable and accessible to the amateur photographer.

Elsewhere, Richard, Beryl and Laura Too is a multi-layered re-presentation of Reeves’ 2012 performance lecture of the same name.  She revisits the original transcript and images from a slideshow in which she discussed finding a cache of holiday slide transparencies in a junk shop – and her subsequent attempts to investigate the protagonists, their activities and destinations (many of which were also in the South West of the UK).Pairing these with her own family photographs, her critical discussion concerning the nature of the image, the archive and the fragmented make-up of our own personal histories and memories has itself now been re-mediated as an artwork, becoming an archive in its own right.

As a teenager Reeves regularly attended raves held in another part of the same building as this gallery and here she presents a recently rediscovered (and now framed) snapshot from one of these events. It not only marks this commonplace right of passage but also her ongoing relationship with this particular place over time, and her return to the venue under very different circumstances.

Associated events:

Artists Talk: Sat 16 July, 2.30pm, free
Join the artist for an informal tour and discussion about her exhibition and wider practice.

Artists Writing Group: Thurs 21 & 28 July, 7.00 – 9.00pm, free (booking essential)
Laura Reeves hosts a smallwriting group over a couple of evening sessions. Discuss a text selected by the artist, share your written responses and discover more about how writing can inform an art practice.

Further details: http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk

About the artist:

Laura Reeves (1987) grew up in Exeter before moving to Cardiff, graduating in Fine Art from Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2012. The same year she won the Eisteddfod Young Artist Scholarship and had her first solo showat Motorcade/FlashParade, Bristol. She was one of seven young artists nationwide nominated to participate in the Master Class at Zabludowicz Collection and was the first resident artist at g39’s library in Cardiff resulting in the publication How To Start a Collection, now available at a variety of distributors in the UK and beyond. In 2013, Reeves was the recipient of the Jane Phillips Award, Mission Gallery Swansea. In 2014, she was selected for Standpoint Futures residency, London as the Wales based representative. She returned to live and work Exeter in 2015. Recent shows include Worksheets at Mostyn, Llandudno and publication Honest, launched at Standpoint Gallery, London (both 2015)
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