Those not acquainted with the online-community life might be surprised to learn just how seriously some of its denizens take it. For instance, a new design career has emerged, for those qualified to construct virtual environments for a client's online persona, or avatar.
Dust Gallery has organized a show that takes the conceit a step further, into art. Architectural Elements gathers artists who carry the concept of the built environment where no contractor ever sets foot.
The closest one might come is the realm of Nikko Mueller, who renders in cartilaginous acrylic the footprint plans of stock North American land development, the golf-course subdivision, the minimart, the transshipment warehouse. Each of these is represented in a painting by the Los Angeles-based artist. For instance, "Country Club Drive," a large, vertical composition in warm but flat tones, presents a typical cul-de-sac with boxy forms arrayed around it, and with swimming pools and sand traps detailed.
Anyone who battles insomnia by watching planning commission meetings on Channel 4 will recognize the type, but Mueller distinguishes these compositions from their real-world analogs by building up layers, and even hinting, in lines, at hipped roofs. It's only an eighth, or maybe a 16th of an inch, perhaps, but enough to make the point that those rectangles on planning documents augur three-dimensional forms. In this case, the sickly tertiary tones of olive and ocher help call into question the imposition of "land use" values so treasured by planners.
The problem is that Mueller sets a high bar by adding depth to the planner's precision. When confronted by blocks of solid color, the eye seeks variation, and here and there Mueller's edges sag, or waver slightly. You could argue that this introduces the notion of imperfections that inevitably mar any attempt to raise a real structure from an ideal plan, but even that has its limits as a satisfying observation.
Las Vegan Mark Brandvik's paintings of buildings recall more conventionally the eerie, isolated aspect of architectural renderings that helped sell clients strikingly "modern" homes and churches in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, the A-frame formation anchors what appears to be a church in one painting, a house in the other. In a sense, Brandvik's "portraits" of these structures help return them to the thrilling, soaring sculptural statements they were before they were built.
All of this serves to remind us of the sizable gap between idealized environments and their actual counterparts. New York-based painter Johnny Detiger stays in the 1960s, circa 1966 or so, by imagining a psychedelic idealization as the intended reality. "Pink Flamingo," with its curlicue-rainbow background, offers a typically "modern" house of the time, with corner windows and a pylon-like chimney that makes the house seem more like a Howard Johnson than a home. But Dad's on the phone in one window, Mom's in another, and the kids are playing in the yard with space-age, clear plastic domes whose purpose is a mystery—except maybe as observation chambers from a subterranean fallout shelter below.
In "All Here" and "Smile," Detiger reduces the palette to mostly black and gray, spinning far-out forms from fussy black-marker doodles. In the former, a 1960s Citroen sedan seems to spout the rest of the composition, including two trees, between which stretches a bubble-like pod of a tree house. It's all very '60s futuresque, except perhaps for the man urinating on the one tree. Or maybe he evokes the "anything goes" ethic of the era.
Detiger could be satirizing the hippie idealism of that time, but the painter also raises the prospect of an environment that makes the ideal the result instead of the genesis of a project. And that is, in a sense, what the earnest citizens of cyberspace do. A time might come when their online lodgings seem as "real" as, well, reality, but people who live in far-suburban palaces and off-Strip condo towers can vouch that reality still counts.
Jonny Andersen and Liam Jones testify to the reality that holds for most of the rest of us. Las Vegas photographer Andersen's color photographs examine the unremarkable around us, including an example of one of those Swingin' '60s "modern" homes, this one with a cut-through for two cars, that have not passed time's test. Jones, a California painter, contributes two flat, bland depictions of the interior of a big-box retailer, showing us where bamboo and banana plants come from. Just another day in the off-the-shelf world.
The works of Marietta Hofferer and Allison Owen, in the back gallery, pay scant heed to the themes played out in the front. Hofferer, from New York, constructs elegant patterns with paper and tape, at once minimal and busy. "Braille," with its checkerboard of tiny, stepped pyramids, could be taken for a tin-ceiling panel design. Owen, from Los Angeles, contributes subdued constructions of blank paper, with here and there a slim horizontal edge of thin, vertical, colored stripes. These are lovely things that need no context, but they could be seen as aerial landscapes of a sort, reminding us of the blank slates on which builders inscribe our modest dreams. For now.