In her artist's statement accompanying the show Heavy Light at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery, artist Victoria Z. Rivers notes that many cultures see textiles as a metaphor for life. The vertical strands, or warp, represent the "fixed elements of life" and the horizontal weft, what is woven, symbolizes "what we do with life."
Rivers offers several examples of her work in which one or the other seems to dominate. In two pieces titled "Lucid Awakening," for instance, a deep melange of form and shape suspends itself against columns on slim, vertical threads, dotted with fuzzy bits like beads of water running down filaments. In "Time Warp II," a band of horizontal bars of color surface to the left through a dense field of forms, and faintly reiterates itself near the center. If we accept Rivers' assertion about metaphor, we might read a busy life running through a firm but light structure in the first pair of works, while finding in the second piece that life has overwhelmed the attempt to weave something through it.
A professor of textile design at the University of California, Davis, Rivers uses threads, yarn, resist-dye fabrics, found fabrics, sequins, appliqué and oil paints in building abstractions that frequently yield the illusion of three-dimensional depth. In some cases, it is as if you are peering into a murky history through the scrim of today. Other works give you the sense of deep psychic space, with elements seemingly floating in and out of immediacy.
Rivers' pieces that use fragments of Asian cloth and embroideries are less mysterious in this way, but mystical nonetheless. "Restitution II: Offering to Chithariya Bhavani, our Lady of Tatters" uses an antique Sumatran textile, a row of floral stems as its backbone, elegant tracery that seems to speak at once of accretion and decay.
A display of work by adjunct staff is not necessarily a clue to an art department's identity or direction, but the Adjunct Faculty Exhibit at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery certainly tends toward edgy observation and commentary. Sean Russell alone seems content with austere formal endeavors; his two graphite drawings are literally sheets of solid graphite worked onto paper, a glistening, olive-toned reminder that art materials are, after all, material.
But for the most part, his colleagues work in representational modes to tell stories or kick an idea down the road. Both Kevin Bays and Miguel Rodriguez use ceramics to tweak social conventions, à la the late Robert Arneson. Michael Ogilvie's "Proofs" is a fantastic cartoon, its panels hung in plastic sleeves, that tells a tale of gory destruction, mating and abandonment, but it's backdrop is contemporary society. And Daryl Depry's large-scale woodcut prints incisively knife through club culture's veneer of glamour.
Meanwhile, Merilee Hortt shows a suite of her entertaining pairings of old-master pictures and paintings of animals in the style and palette of those forerunners, and Mark Brandvik exhibits pristine, hard-edged views of buildings, wrought in enamel on paper. "El Morocco Redux" emphasizes the building's giant, sweeping arches.
It's a show of varied eccentricities but it melds and works.
I don't often write about student art, but now and then, something crops up worth attention. Thank Donna Beam gallery director Jerry Schefcik for steering me to the nearby Grant Hall gallery, where through this weekend you can admire the large charcoal drawings of Mary Lou Evans.
Evans' subjects are the typical concerns of a young woman, from love to appearance to emotional torment—draw what you know, right?—but her work is richly done. "Dream Sequence: Naked in Class" refers to the common nightmare but instead of a cowering figure in a full classroom, it presents a sleeping nude, on her side, facing away, under a blackboard.
Nice touch.