The play between figure and ground is an old and venerable preoccupation of artists, speaking to the basic act of sight; distinguishing an object of attention from everything around it. For abstract artists, this concern sustains a vestige of the representational—the Blob vs. the Universe—and it allows them to tweak expectations.
For Yoko Kondo Konopik, whose large abstract paintings fill the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery through September 11, the relation between figure and ground allows for the extension of some aspects of the objective world into the abstract. Konopik, a Valley resident and member of the Henderson Art Association who has studied in Tokyo and Paris, turns out large and sprightly compositions, generally with one or two amorphous shapes afloat in fields of solid color.
In some cases, such as "Smile" and "Orange Peel," the figures are outlined in white, as if a protective membrane shields them from the surrounding field. In others, the figures confront their backgrounds more directly, setting up engaging tensions of tone and line, sometimes carrying across two halves of a diptych and sometimes playing them against each other. In "Eeasy," the warmer of two close tones of yellow jumps from the ground of one panel to the E-shaped figure of the other. Mostly the backgrounds are solid and dense, but in "emails" hard-edged "E" figures tumble through a pale pink-rose that suggests murky, limitless depth.
For the most part, these work as purely formal exercises, because Konopik has a rich sense of how to evoke dynamics of color and line, whether in the subtle relations of tone and value in "Eeasy" or the interaction of striped forms on a lime-green background in "Incomplete." But it seems as if larger scale is needed. Konopik's suite of three smaller paintings in cases outside the gallery is less successful, principally because she's got too much going on in spaces too small.
Las Vegas 1905-1950: A Photographic Survey at the city's Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery through August 14 is the result of research done by Long Beach, California, photographer Sarah G. Vinci. Supported by the Nevada Humanities Committee and the local American Institute of Architects chapter, Vinci pored through prints in the UNLV Libraries' Special Collections, the Las Vegas News Bureau and private collections.
Vinci, who has shown work and organized shows at Reed Whipple, warns in a statement that these photographs are not up to "visual standards," given that they are mostly ad hoc records of street scenes. But the pairings of older and newer scenes can be quite revealing. For instance, a 1930 view of a tree-lined Fremont Street with a banner welcoming the secretary of interior, in town to survey potential workers' housing sites for the Boulder Dam project, could portray a boosterish Main Street, Anywhere. But the accompanying view of the same vista several decades later puts the lie to the earlier image.
An early look at Will Beckley's Men's Shop, which replaced a fire-ravaged opera house, is paired with a later view of the same location, now occupied by Guy McAfee's Pioneer Club and Vegas Vic, both of whose fates would also change. Vinci's survey encapsulates the Downtown's history and captures a sense of the energy that leaves nothing the same for long here.
Looking ahead: The Contemporary Artists Collective opens its annual Members Juried Show with the First Friday festivities this week. Winners will be announced at 8 p.m. Also, Dust Gallery opens an show by Carrie Jenkins: Blondes Have More Fun. Jenkins, a UNLV graduate, paints with a blithe, 1960s pop-art flair that belies hard-edged observation.