Look This Way
Look This Way Exhibit logo

Jodi Colella | Jackie Reeves | Kimberly Sheerin

September 6 – October 30

Opening Reception: September 13, 4:30 – 6:00pm

This exhibition presents the provocative new work of three mid-career women artists and offers an intriguing counterpoint to the daguerreotypes on view in the Through the Looking Glass exhibition.

Just as these artists question the gravitas of the photographer, they challenge the viewer to stop, look deeper, linger longer and to consider what their artwork truly reveals. Even as people and moments are recorded by the camera, things are not always what they seem; even though we possess family photographs we hold dear, memory is fleeting and transient; even when we think a photograph tells us the truth, there is so much that is never recorded.

Jodi Colella, Jackie Reeves and Kimberly Sheerin also invite you to revisit the Through the Looking Glass show with these questions in mind, and to discover what you see when you Look This Way.

Annie Dean, curator

Cahoon Contemporaries proudly supported by:
Bilezikian Family Foundation, Inc. &.

Jodi Colella Fiber artist and sculptor

Fiber artist Jodi Colella is fascinated by early photography and collects antique tintype portraits which she manipulates to create evocative artworks with dark humor and surrealist imagery. Her new series, Ghost Stories, is inspired by the uneasy postures and expressions evident in daguerreotype portraits, whose subjects were required to sit without moving for many minutes before their image could be captured. For Colella, these minutes also expose a sliver of the soul that she contemplates and then seeks to reveal and investigate.

Jodi Colella

Unidentified Women | Ghost Stories

Fiber artist and sculptor Jodi Colella works out of her studio in Somerville, MA, and exhibits and teaches internationally. She is a member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery and a recipient of a 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship Award for Sculpture. She utilizes traditional needle arts paired with provocative materials to create both intimate and monumental sculptures that engage the viewer while eliciting the simultaneous reactions of whimsy and threat.

“I use needlework to infuse renewed power to craft practices. I push the boundaries of traditional techniques to create works that imply an inner vitality and self-awareness of what it means to be human,” she explains.

For her most recent work, Colella scours flea markets and collects antique tintype photographs to incorporate in her artistic process. She says, “in my Unidentified Women series, I am struck by the poignant anonymity of the tintypes. I alter them with raw and idiosyncratic embroidery to call attention to those whose identities are long forgotten.”

In her Ghost Stories series, she has developed a new technique to expand her small intimate tintype portraits both in size and expression. They are scanned, enlarged, cropped, transferred onto large sheets of aluminum, and then embroidered to create powerful confrontive images.

Colella explains, “by investigating for hidden meanings that lay just below the surface, I focus on the strangeness of what is assumed to be known – but isn’t. The new images convey both whimsy and threat as they capture that place where anxiety and beauty can co-mingle. In this way, an obsolete 19th century photo process is transformed into an object of contemporary relevance that recontextualizes history and begs the question: What is really going on here? Is what we see really what it is?”

Jackie Reeves Painter

Painter Jackie Reeves recaptures fleeting moments of personal history in her Memory Paintings based on old family photo albums dating back to the 1920s and super-8 home movies. Inspired by the daguerreotypes, she has created new works on aluminum, leaving more metal exposed to create images that flicker, shift, and change as the viewer moves by and light filters across them – much like a daguerreotype shifts from positive to negative image depending on which side is viewed.

Jackie Reeves

Memory Paintings

Painter Jackie Reeves, co-founder of Chalkboard Studios in Barnstable, exhibits widely, is an accomplished teacher and a recent recipient of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s Fellowship Award for Visual Arts. She manipulates oil paint in creative and expressive ways and builds images by applying, pulling, pouring, and dragging the paint, sometimes removing entire areas, to create images that both emerge and dissolve at the same time.

In her recent series, Memory Paintings, she mines generations of inherited family albums and Super 8 films to create images that fade in and out and that hover between memory and dreams.

Reeves states, “As we struggle to remember the specifics of a certain memory, some of the edges come into focus, sharp and well defined. Other details are hazy and remain tantalizing, just beyond our grasp. Remembrances fade and stories evolve, yet these impressions constantly shape our perceptions throughout our lifetime. A photograph—presenting a two-dimensional representation of an exact moment in time—would seem to contain the truth of a memory, but often stands in opposition to our recollections. Add the fact that photography is so frequently altered in subtle (and dramatic) ways and the nature of reality becomes perplexing and malleable.”

Concerning memory, she asks: “How are our lives defined by what we experience and remember? What is the nature of our existence when those memories fade or disappear altogether?”

Kimberly Sheerin Ceramicist

Ceramicist Kimberly Sheerin has created a new series of portraits of women surrounded by ornate frames inspired by the elaborate designs used to protect and display 19th century daguerreotypes. In contrast to the ephemeral photograph, her monumental vessels memorialize in solid clay the lives of significant women tackling urgent social issues of global importance side-by-side women whose lives remain hidden and unknown.

Jackie Reeves

Memory Paintings

Painter Jackie Reeves, co-founder of Chalkboard Studios in Barnstable, exhibits widely, is an accomplished teacher and a recent recipient of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s Fellowship Award for Visual Arts. She manipulates oil paint in creative and expressive ways and builds images by applying, pulling, pouring, and dragging the paint, sometimes removing entire areas, to create images that both emerge and dissolve at the same time.

In her recent series, Memory Paintings, she mines generations of inherited family albums and Super 8 films to create images that fade in and out and that hover between memory and dreams.

Reeves states, “As we struggle to remember the specifics of a certain memory, some of the edges come into focus, sharp and well defined. Other details are hazy and remain tantalizing, just beyond our grasp. Remembrances fade and stories evolve, yet these impressions constantly shape our perceptions throughout our lifetime. A photograph—presenting a two-dimensional representation of an exact moment in time—would seem to contain the truth of a memory, but often stands in opposition to our recollections. Add the fact that photography is so frequently altered in subtle (and dramatic) ways and the nature of reality becomes perplexing and malleable.”

Concerning memory, she asks: “How are our lives defined by what we experience and remember? What is the nature of our existence when those memories fade or disappear altogether?”