JTF (just the facts): A paired show of paintings by Hannah Beerman and black-and-white photographs by Olivia Reavey. The photographs are hung unframed (pinned directly to the wall) in the main gallery space. (Installation shots below.)

The following works by Reavey are on view in the show:

• 7 gelatin silver prints, 2024, 2025, sized roughly 11×15, 13×16, 13×17, 14×17, 14×18, 16×20, 40×31 inches, in editions of 5+1AP
• 19 gelatin silver prints, 2021-2025, various sizes, unique

The show also includes 7 paintings by Beerman, in acrylic, house paint, spray paint, ink, enamel, with various physical additions, 2023, 2025, sized roughly 11×14, 20×16, 48×52, 52×48, 59×48, 60×48, unique.

Comments/Context: In our 21st century artistic moment, the decision to make nude portraiture (or self-portraiture) feels overtly freighted with conceptual complexity. We might say of course that this has always been the case, starting back with the very first pictures of nude human bodies ever made, but it’s clear that contemporary artists are much more actively engaging with the inherent nuances and tensions of nude photography than ever before. We’re now acutely aware of who is in front of the camera, who is behind it, and the power dynamics of that arrangement; whether the photographic gaze is male, female, or some other variant of gender or desire; and how photographic representations of bodies tell stories, craft identities, reinforce (or challenge) stereotypes and roles, or provide opportunities for risk-taking expression.

For a younger photographer like Olivia Reavey, who has done her artistic training at rigorous places like RISD and Yale, it’s impossible that she could have come this far without having to actively negotiate with the history (and the present) of the medium. Between classes and crits, when she has shown her nude self-portraits to her teachers and peers, there isn’t any possibility that she hasn’t been asked about connections with various artists – Man Ray’s surreal nudes, Harry Callahan’s multiple exposure nudes, Francesca Woodman’s moody interiors and nude self portraits, Carolee Schneemann’s nude performances, the transgressive physicality of the Viennese Actionists, the feminine role provocations of 1970’s feminist artists like VALIE EXPORT and Penny Slinger, or possible links to more contemporary names like Talia Chetrit, Tarrah Krajnak, B. Ingrid Olson, Whitney Hubbs, and others. There is no chance that all of this and more hasn’t been swirling around in her head as she has made her art, and so we can conclude that whatever echoes to these pasts we might see in her work are there on purpose, as part of an ongoing dialogue with that history, and that she is still working through the natural artistic process of learning, trying, borrowing, repurposing, and transforming, on her way to a unique artistic voice that is honed down to only what she wants to express.

This is a paired gallery show, with Reavey’s photographs intermingled with paintings by Hannah Beerman, but here at Collector Daily, we don’t pretend to be current enough with contemporary painting to tease out the subtleties in Beerman’s work, or to even thoughtfully consider how what we see in her paintings might curatorially activate or enrich our understanding of Reavey’s photographs. So with all respect to Beerman’s contributions to this combined show, Reavey’s photographs are the main focus of this discussion.

While Reavey doesn’t appear to work in discrete projects, her photographs on view in this show can be divided into two somewhat separate piles – recent individual images from the last year or two, printed large, and a cluster of smaller prints made over the past handful of years, essentially undated. The single largest photograph in the show centers around Reavey posing nude with various industrial materials. The composition has a surreal 1920s aesthetic baseline, with a gestural twist of pleated plastic tubing and wire (likely the shutter release) covering her midsection, a wire trash bin at her feet, and the wire frame of an antique fan held artfully in front of her face, with its circular center positioned around her eye. As a composition, it’s vaguely seductive, and certainly aware of its formal qualities of line and curve, and Reavey is entirely present – her eye meets ours, as photographed in a mirror, with the rough walls and ceiling of whatever room she is in adding some textural and atmospheric interest, with some dappled reflected light introducing another layer of mystery.

What’s perhaps more fascinating about this image isn’t this whole carefully arranged setup, it’s the presence of the nude male figure seen standing on the side, essentially spatially in the distance behind the mirror. His presence disrupts what we think is going on –  she isn’t just seeing herself in some privately choreographed artistic moment, she’s being seen by him, and she’s seeing him with the same gaze she’s applying to herself, and he’s nude just like she is. This opens up lots of narrative possibilities and options – she’s performing for him, he’s performing for her, she’s watching, he’s watching (although he may be blocked by the mirror), this is before or after some kind of seduction, or not. And it is this deliberate uncertainty that gives this picture its punch – what was initially a female gaze at a private female body is now quite a bit more layered and complicated.

Much of Reavey’s work feels rooted in this kind of disruption, of knowing and acknowledging the existing traditions of the female nude in photography and then pushing beyond those perceived limits. As an overarching style, it’s confident and transgressive, with a range of visual provocations that crackle with energy, liberally using her own body and those of others. Formally, she remains elegant in her photographic control of line and shape, particularly as seen in a kneeling image under a comforter with a twisting intrusion of shutter release wire, and in another of fingers spreading some kind of folded pipe held between her thighs, the pulling apart taking place like a spreading of her vulva. Still other performative images find her peeking out from behind a piece of metal heating duct, balancing a sheet of dusty glass in her open mouth, and biting on the skin of her male friend with feral persistence. Each of these prints has been roughly cut from a roll of darkroom paper, reinforcing their loosely chaotic physicality.

The rest of Reavey’s works on view are installed in a single dense cluster. These are much smaller images made in the past handful of years, and find Reavey actively experimenting, trying out different aesthetic ideas and following each of them for a while. Bodies remain her consistent subject, with male and female seemingly explored in equal measure, with erect penises, bare breasts, and various other body parts often isolated and used as subjects. Aesthetically, she’s taking risks with high contrast and flash, multiple exposures, incised and cut away prints, seeing through sheets of Plexiglas, and other less identifiable techniques, seemingly always on the lookout for a way to upend a nude body or to renegotiate the rules of representation. In a sense, this restless search for brashness is always on a knife edge, sometimes surprising and sometimes mannered, with blood, hair, water, bound bodies, and scraped skin becoming the unruly symbolic material of breaching convention.

With younger artists at the beginning of their careers, I think it makes sense to focus on the promising seeds of what they’ve been doing already and then look forward to what could go right. In Reavey’s case, she’s not the first young woman in the history of the medium to consider her own body with a dose of provocative swagger, but that doesn’t mean she can’t carve out a unique artistic playing field for herself, one that smartly wrestles with the complexities of the photographic past while still making room for strong actions and reactions. There continues to be plenty of room for contemporary female photographers to take staged or diaristic approaches to bodies, desires, representations, and conventions, and the strongest of Reavey’s early photographs push and shove with a sophisticated mix of subtlety and audacity. Can this freewheelingly insolent experimentation be channelled into a consistently unexpected mix of assertiveness and precision? That’s the question for her first New York solo, coming sometime I imagine in the not-so-distant future.

Collector’s POV: The larger editioned photographs by Reavey are priced at $1500 or $3500 each based on size, with the smaller unique prints priced at $1200 each. The Beerman paintings range in price from $3500 to $8000 each.