KERRI-LYNN REEVES is an interdisciplinary artist based in Winnipeg, working with textile, video, installation, and socially engaged practices. She received her BFA Honours from the University of Manitoba, and attended Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting student. Her work ranges from very personal contemplative pieces to larger socially engaging public works often involving themes of legacy, personal and community history, the influences of the past, identity, relationships, and gender. They are created in any/all media, and are dictated by ideas. The personal projects usually manifest in installation, video, and textile works, while her social practice ranges from collaborative installations to curation of large group projects and presentations.
Response to Kerri-lynn Reeves by Stacy Cardigan Smith
THE DINNER PARTY SERIES
The Dinner Party Series is a sequence of socially engaging dinner parties involving various people that live, work, and study at the University of Winnipeg and the surrounding Spence Street neighborhood. The series is facilitated, organized, and observed by Kerri-Lynn Reeves. In the long tradition of social dining and breaking bread together, this project brings together diverse groups to forge connections over the dinner table. An intimate setting mixed with the social act of sharing in food leads to great conversations, quite often intimate, occasionally intense, and always bringing the dinner party guests closer together as they identify similarities and better understand differences. The new networks created by the Dinner Party Series have been “mapped” by Reeves, creating a physical representation of the efforts towards community building and a testament to the importance of connection.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The idea of community is of great importance to me, and stems from my upbringing in a Manitoba farming area where my family has lived for 125 years. This deep rootedness has been my support and inspiration, as well as a source of guilt, because I have decided not to continue to live rurally. I honour my legacy through my art, by making works that focus on the strengths and plights of my community and by instigating community-building in other places. My desire to work with others, to move forward and create projects and connections like the groups of pioneers that settled the Prairies, also stems from my strong connection to my family’s past. It is through my work that I try to better understand the world and help to make others better understand as well, while they make connections between ideas, emotions, and people.
THE DINNER PARTY SERIES
PAST WORK
"The Tin Can Phone Project" Installation, 2007
"How The West Was Fun" video still 2006
"The Swag Bag Project" gift bag 2007