Whatever Serves the Sculpture: Jessi Reaves on Bad Apartment Shelf 

Jessi Reaves approaches sculpture like an open conversation with her materials—slicing and rearranging found objects, used furniture, and other remnants and following the work’s own emerging logic. Bad Apartment Shelf began, like many of Reaves’s sculptures, as a simple shape cut out of plywood that then provided the structural support for an accretive gathering of thin, woven caning fragments and intuitively shaped, amorphous wood forms. Reaves’s works often hover between sculpture and furniture, exposing the labor involved in their making and holding space for quirks that may emerge in the process—in this case, the eponymous shelf that happened to slide perfectly into place.

The result is a sculpture that feels both improvised and inevitable, revealing Reaves’s three-dimensional thinking and iterative, real-time problem-solving as not merely a means to an end but central to the work’s character.