A Boat Made of Ocean

Ben Reeves’ paintings hover between abstraction and illusion.

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Ben Reeves’ paint handling verges on the sculptural. It crests to thick peaks, while elsewhere it is scraped back, asserting the physicality of the canvas. Meanwhile, his choice of colours, such as the pinks of scarcely hidden underpaintings and the yellows of cascading water, intensify the sense that these works are about memory.

In his exhibition, A Boat Made of Ocean, on view until Nov. 20 at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, Reeves explores his interest in “in-betweenness,” the nebulous non-place that bridges the polarities of abstraction and illusion, nature and civilization, adolescence and adulthood, hovering between two definitions, never fully belonging to either.

In Front Stair Vape, a self-absorbed adolescent sits on the steps behind an iron railing; ropy strands of smoke sail skyward, counter to his down-tilted head. Behind the boy, a wall is flattened into abstract shapes of blue and pink. The stylized leaves of the iron railing signify domination over nature and, as a painted pattern, flatten the illusionistic picture plane. The house that typically includes this style of railing is known as the Vancouver Special, built prolifically from the 1960s to the 1980s. It exists nowhere else, making this visual reference specific to place.

Headwaters refers to an area in the Vancouver suburbs where Reeves grew up and returns to frequently with his adolescent sons. The painting, in pastel blues with yellows and pale greens flickering through, hits a note of wistfulness for his own youth and the vanishing childhood of his offspring.

In Apollo Sport, a bike leans against a cinderblock wall. Both are reminiscent of another era. The cell-like pattern created by these cement bricks reflects nature and acts as a tenuous reference to the cultivated landscape. Behind the barrier, camouflaged against bushes and boulders, are young hikers, each absorbed in vaping, simultaneously an act of rebellion and a rite of passage.

Reeves typically designs his compositions to eliminate horizons and separate viewers from the scene by placing a fence, a row of saplings or a swathe of leaves as a barrier to teenagers set within, but disengaged from, a natural landscape, as if to say being on the cusp of adulthood puts them in their own world.

The show includes three versions of a waterfall. Distant figures are scattered about the rocks, reading or looking at their devices, alone together, a comment on how our relationships with nature are now mediated by technology. These portrayals are vastly different from the traditional genre of landscape painting, in which nature is romanticized and dominated. The water here is falling fast and furious, but the teenagers are caught in their own worlds, and both natural and manufactured fences keep viewers from accessing their space. The luscious paint handling seems a consolation for our exclusion. ■  

Ben Reeves: A Boat Made of Ocean at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver from Oct. 16 to Nov. 20, 2021.

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Equinox Gallery

3642 Commercial Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V5N 4G2

604-736-2405

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