07/09/2026
Jackie Reeves is a Montreal-born multidisciplinary artist based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, whose practice moves between painting, drawing, collage, installation, and animation. Working across figurative and abstract forms, her work is rooted in memory, family lineage, motherhood, and material experimentation. She frequently begins with family photographs and archival images, allowing them to open into broader questions about identity, perception, and how we construct the stories we carry with us.
For the first half of her career, Reeves worked primarily as a commercial artist, moving through illustration, graphic design, set painting, commissions, and fifteen years of professional mural painting. A major shift came in her forties after the death of her older sister, which forced her to reconsider what she wanted from her own life and work. She stepped away from commissions and entered the studio without a client or assignment for the first time, asking herself, “What am I going to paint and why?” “What did I need to say? What is my voice?”
Much of Reeves’ work today explores family history and the mother-daughter relationship. Using photographs inherited from her mother alongside images of her own three daughters, she investigates what gets passed from one generation to the next and how photographs influence the way we remember. “My work is really about my family for the most part,” she says. “I focus a lot on trying to figure out who I am and where do I come from, and why do I make the way I make.”
Her studio process is equally rooted in uncertainty. Reeves moves constantly between materials and surfaces, often changing direction once a process begins to feel too familiar. She allows paint to bleed, pool, drip, fold, and respond to gravity, treating accidents as part of the work rather than something to correct. “I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I’m just here to play and learn.” Ultimately, her practice is an ongoing attempt to move beyond habit and control toward something more instinctive and personal. “My goal is to let go of everything that I know, empty my head and paint from someplace that is really authentic to me.”
