Rebekah Callaghan & Ben Reeves | Ephemeral Ground

Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present Ephemeral Ground, a joint exhibition featuring artists Rebekah Callaghan & Ben Reeves. 

Philadelphia-based artist Rebekah Callaghan paints flowers and foliage, but her subject matter is color, light and the passage of time. Painting from gardens and plants, these recognizable elements are reduced to their most skeletal forms enmeshed with bright bursts of patterning and muted tones of suggested shadows. 

Made with many layers of paint, each responding to the layer before, the work calls to the complexity of change and the beauty of transformation. These layered, lustrous botanical compositions ask the viewer to look closely and carefully, bringing attention to both the act of painting and the joy of looking.

Ben Reeves’ work takes inspiration from memories of growing up in the suburban fringes of Vancouver. He paints largely from memory, often using heightened color and building pictures that foreground the materiality of paint and surface. He is interested in how reality is not fixed and experience is hallucinatory. His paintings, though representational, embrace abstraction and often resist easy pictorial resolution.

Reeves’ work is noted for a broad range of painterly and surface effects. Often very thick, juicy brushwork is juxtaposed with thin, mineral washes, or coarse burlap surfaces are built-up with paint and scraped back down. Recently, he has begun to collage colorfully stained pieces of canvas into his paintings with an interest in how these gestures can have an autonomous, formal independence within a representational image.