Bay Area Premiere!

Artist in Person

Obsessive Becoming (54 mins) is a reconciliatory return to memories buried deep in the marrow of a once-innocent child. At first we think Reeves's beautifully crafted work is unspooling the photographic history of a family's roiled past. Revelations of child abuse, of shadow parents and missing siblings surface like distorted reflections in water. An image of abuse, captured by chance in mid-fifties family footage, recycles like a brutish ghost. Though there is a painful universality to these lives, there is also the sweet conviction that love traces our paths. In one stunning sequence, portraits of Reeves's ancestors are morphed, generation to generation, revealing the persistence of a bloodline and a history. Reeves's premiere work, Shibboleth (7 mins), moves beyond the legacy of individual acts to witness in anguish the brutalized people of a century past, a century that bleeds so sanguinely into our own. Using a digital collage that brilliantly amalgamates historical events, this evocative elegy summons those whose lives were stolen in the name of political, racial, and religious ideas. "This is not a work of accusation, blame, or condemnation," Reeves said. "It is a public act of grieving rather than grievance."