Usually, the word "illustration" rings with negative connotations in an art gallery. Pegging it to a painting signifies an inferior impulse, art in service to something other than itself. But the Contemporary Arts Collective's show redeems the term, proving that art sometimes can serve a story and maintain its integrity.
Keepers of the Flame is a noteworthy, and entirely worthy, departure for the CAC, which has welcomed artists associated with North Las Vegas' Left of Center Gallery to share the spotlight of the bustling Downtown scene. It was refreshing to see a dense and richly diverse crowd filling the gallery for last week's First Friday.
Organized by Left of Center director Vicki Richardson as a Centennial project, Keepers of the Flame uses the talents of Richardson, Dayo Adelaja, Harold Bradford, Sylvester Collier, Adolfo Gonzalez and William Pajaud to help document minority contributions to the city's past. With help from the Oral History Research Center at UNLV's Lied Library, whose recordings augment the paintings, the artists examined minorities in Las Vegas, from early exploration to west-side nightclubs.
These efforts range from Bradford's richly toned view of early ranchers James B. Wilson and John Howell, on horseback by the springs that sustained the first settlers; to Collier's segmented, mosaic-like images of industry and dam-building, and Pajaud's vigorous, sketchy evocation of a steamy nightclub scene. Visual strategies vary, including Collier's semi-cubist approach, Gonzalez's hard-edged impressionism and Adelaja's melange of stylized figures and forms. Richardson figuratively rips a canvas to show red die and Vegas Vic intruding upon an American-Indian desert habitat in "Homeland Left to Chance."
At their best, these painters recall the heyday of the Federal Art Project murals of the 1930s and prove this sort of work is never out-of-date.
Another sign of the gathering maturity of Downtown's art scene can be found in the vivid contrast between the shows at the Dust and Godt-Cleary Projects galleries. In Dust, New Yorker Eun Young Choi's silver-mylar clouds, clotted with myriad stickers, are accented by little streams and clusters of cutout Superman figures pinned to the walls. It is as whimsical and exuberant as the Godt-Cleary show is severe and spare.
In fact, at Godt-Cleary, you'll find just two works: an 8-foot-tall, garnet-colored, polyester resin monolith by John McCracken, and a triangular projection of rosy light by James Turrell. Both men have been in the forefront of minimalist sculpture since the 1960s.
You can stand at the gallery's counter and take in the pair of simple, geometric forms and the way the two tones of red play off of each other. But each strikingly commands its discrete space. McCracken's shaft occupies the front room like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a vaguely ominous presence. Turrell's wedge of light projected into a floor corner of the back room is a form of two and three dimensions and nothing at all, but a resonating force.
Where McCracken's and Turrell's work is all about form, Choi's is a surfeit of representational ebullience that dominates its space in a different manner. I'll call it "gallage." Drawing on vast stores of commercial stickers, she peppers cloud-shaped mylar forms with tiny people, pets, foods, flowers, balls and buildings. Each cloud has its thematic unities: sailboats and tourist landmarks on one, a cascade of Chinese-food boxes and tiny fortune-cookie strips on another.
But Choi's work has its formal properties, too. Stickers are grouped densely along edges as if to outline the clouds, and in general, they are deployed like pointillist brush strokes that amalgamate colors.
Both shows offer much more than they seem to on first glance.