Daniel M. Reeves is a Scotland-based artist who has probed the inevitable collision of unshakable innocence and an ill-tempered universe. Working with video since the mid-70's, Reeves has sought a path through this world that is redemptive, breathtaking and courageous. His autobiographical videowork, OBSESSIVE BECOMING, is a reconcilliatory return to formative memories buried deep in the marrow of a haunted child. Revelations of child abuse, ghostly parents and missing siblings surface like distorted re­flections in water. What at first seems the beautifully crafted unraveling of a family's roiled past becomes much more - a glimpse into the shadows of a dark ancestral legacy, a lineage of historical dimension. "The secrets in our family were immense. The secrets in this world are immense." The family secrets in O.B. are real enough. An act of abuse captured serendipitiously in a mid-50's home movie recycles like a brutish specter, adding a kind of eerie credence to the artist's words. Whether real or imagined, confronting one's childhood demons has its salutary effects. En­gaged viewers sense the profound release of terrifying things from Reeves' live. An earlier example of poetic exorcism, SMOTHERING DREAMS (1981) served to extricate him from the horrors of the Vietnam War. Injured during the Tet offensive, Reeves spent years trying to heal unyieding emotional wounds. Silence, he learned, was the greatest enemy. And so in OB, the personal revelations and bemusements are articulately voiced: "I choose to try and name them." But Reeves doesn't settle for personal salvation. As in earlier works, such as the lyrical essay GANAPATI / A SPIRIT IN THE BUSH (1986), which pictures the plight of elephants as univer­sal tragedy, Reeves has always searched man's imperfections for clues to the greater failings of our commu­nal history. Autobiography as a rich and challeng­ing wellspring for artistic inspiration is not exclusive to Reeves. But what makes his works so enthralling is his masterful orchestration of the medi­um's many elements: image, sound and language. An accomplished poet, Reeves has an acute sensitivity to rhythms and colorations. His charmed choreography of family movies, inter­views, photographs, re-enactments and archival footage sets in motion a deeply textured montage, further ani­mated by rhapsodic narration and ele­giac strains of music.
In one stunning sequence, portraits of Reeves' ancestors are morphed, gene­ration to generation, revealing the persistence of a bloodline and a cher­ished history. Along with keen hand tintings and other painterly treatmens, the hich-tech effect of morphing finally becomes not so much graphical pizzazz as a visual recognition of our seamless linkage to the past.
In OB, Reeves backlights his family's peculiar and sometimes painful story with some of this century's more griev­ ous events: the Warsaw Ghetto, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War. Growing up under the stern hand of his ruffian father, Milton, was but a miniture of the high drama that pitted clan against clan, nation against nation. To feel compassion for Milton who, as it turns out, was also an abused child, is to triumph over the catastrophe repe­tition.
"What we have failed to look for in ourselves will come back again and again to sleep in the dreams of our children." OB is an attempt to acknowledge those failings and then, hope against hope, thwart the age­ long cycle of cruelty. Thousands Watch, Smothering Dreams
Arches, Ganapati / A Spirit in the Bush, Sabda, Obsessive Becoming, One with Everything, Perdu