For the second time this year, the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery hosts an exhibition trumpeting the planned Neon Museum, with extracts from its "boneyard" of defunct signs and representations of its trashed treasures by artists.
This time around, the artists are photographers, with the exception of plein-aire painter Michelle Auboiron, whose large-scale paintings of Southwest landscapes and Vegas motels are exhibited, respectively, at UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum and the city's Charleston Heights Arts Center. Here, she contributes a panoramic view of the boneyard, providing reference points for a number of the photographs, which mostly investigate details of the scrapped signs.
The irony in this, of course, is that the signs, in their original incarnations, were never intended for intimate viewing, but rather the distant, comprehensive glance. To zoom in on their battered contours and rusty, peeling surfaces suggests an analog of the indignities that the passing of popularity's parade visits on yesterday's celebrities, much like the once-hilarious comic squatting in the center square or the ex-teen singer posing for Playboy.
So when Chicago-based photographer Judy Natal exposes the bruised, high-heeled pump that once lured gamblers, its surface pocked with empty bulb sockets, or the head of Fitzgerald's amiable mascot, ridiculously horizontal, some part of the viewer shudders and contemplates the destiny to which all matter tends. Californian Terry Sutherland gets even closer to the constituent parts of signs, an orphaned "T," for instance, but his project is to isolate abstract compositions, as in "Orange Abstract 3," a rust-scarred vector of orange and yellow. However he can't escape the substantiality of the artifacts; a patch on the surface in "Blue Abstract 3" has weathered differently than the rest of the sign.
Laura Domela of Portland, Oregon, also concentrates on details, but with rich, saturated pigment printed on watercolor paper that nearly revives the discarded signs. In the center of a grid of nine prints, the "N" of the Royal Nevada Hotel sign takes on an almost phosphorescent aspect not found in the actual letter, displayed to the right of Domela's prints. Meanwhile, Abigail Gumbiner, whose home is unclear, gives us the entire word, "Nevada," viewed at an angle, the letters strung together like charms on a bracelet, oddly luminous against a dim russet background.
These prints, and the fragments from the boneyard around them, counterpoint an exhibit at the Nevada State Museum in Lorenzi Park, where a fuller complement of boneyard refugees remains through Feb. 22. Along with sign fragments, the show includes the early designs for "Vegas Vic," and interactive displays from Young Electric Signs.
Also at the museum, "Art That Glows" comprises artworks exploiting or incorporating light. Probably the most interesting of these is a group of light-box compositions by Austine Wood Comarow, who builds mosaic images with slivers and blocks of translucent cellulose. These are surprisingly accomplished.
Catch this before it's too late
And finally, a word about a show closing this weekend and well worth seeing. Dust Gallery at the Arts Factory waxes "Superficial" with a show of works by Carrie Jenkins and Angela Kallus. Jenkins' paintings almost fit the title: seemingly lightweight, decorative images of stylish, tank-topped young women you might find in a furniture store. But they are clearly more—canny studies of waifish party girls that call that milieu into question.
Kallus' paintings are spectacular, cleverly composed of thousands of pastry-decorating rosettes and flourishes that build fields of color that vary with astonishing subtlety, or radiate with bold chromatic intensity. But Kallus has hit on more than a gimmick. One can imagine a range of orbits she might explore. These mostly abstract paintings are plenty for the moment.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.