One of the most tiresome aspects of life in Las Vegas is the chatter of old-timers who pine for the glory days of satin skirts and skinny ties, when the mob ran the town and the comps and cocktails flowed freely.
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Yeah—nothing like crumpling next to a creosote bush with a bullet in your skull.
For better or worse, though, that's the Las Vegas that nurtured artist Angee Jackson, whose suite of paintings, Las Vegas Stories, echoes the tales she heard while growing up. At MTZC gallery through June, Jackson's paintings build on the memories evoked by a mural she painted at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, for the Las Vegas Centennial Committee's City of 100 Murals project last year.
That painting crowned Elvis king of a court that included such lesser mortals as Charo and Wayne Newton. At MTZC, the king gets taken down a peg by "Viva Ann-Margret," which recalls his brief fling with his movie costar. Against a background of pale, horizontal blue and pink stripes—boy and girl?—Elvis is shown running off with Priscilla while Ann-Margret ponders, "He loves me, he loves me not." Actually, the phrase is lettered across her portrait, and a little yellow devil above Presley's shoulder points at his ear. A text panel makes it clear Ann-Margret was anything but crushed that Presley had thrown her over. Instead, she told her story widely: "Was she out of her mind, or just standing up for all of the world's used women?"
Or getting even? As the panel points out, she married TV star Roger Smith at the Riviera the same month, May 1967, that Presley married Priscilla at the Aladdin, and they remain married.
If you get the idea that this is one of those shows that requires reading a text panel next to each painting, you're just about right. Anyone with ready knowledge of those Vegas heydays should be able to interpret Jackson's paintings without her printed concordances. But, in a way, they're half the fun.
Jackson is the daughter of a Stardust pit boss, whose stories about Old Vegas continue to fascinate her, but her attitude about those days seems at once nostalgic and clear-eyed. She studied art for a while at UNLV, but she says she honed her skills painting large-scale signs for Tower Records. And the pop inflection of her paintings is anything but academic. She cites old movie posters and product packaging as influences, but the busy fervor of these paintings seems more akin to that of mid-century magazine ads—the kind in which doctors seconded the cigarette endorsements of baseball players.
Similarly, the bright enthusiasm of her compositions sometimes clashes with the misfortunes of the stories they evoke. Painted on wood panels with glossy glaze accented by glitter, they seem all about lively fun and glamour, but the people pictured have other tales to tell. Large tondos, imaginary casino chips, recall the 1970s Stardust and the 1950s Moulin Rouge, but the text panels remind you that the mob pushed aside Stardust owner Allen Glick, and that the Moulin Rouge, the first integrated casino, did not last a year.
"Call of the Wildest," with the title painted red in a script that suggests the runny blood of horror-movie posters, relates the unfortunate fate of Louis Prima and Keely Smith, who are pictured dancing cheek-to-cheek. But, as Jackson reminds us, "It was no big secret that both Louis and Keely were spreading a bit o' that 'Old Black Magic' around town." Another team headed for Splitsville is pictured in several configurations in another painting. "Hollywood or Bust!" might have been the byword for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, but they got there on separate tracks. Between two Hirschfeld-style caricatures of the stars appears the legend, "Bad Blood."
At times, Jackson's portraits seem a little stiff, as you might expect from outsized renderings of old publicity and magazine photos, but this quality only serves to heighten the lost-age irreality. And Jackson's repertoire of weeping arrows and slashing beams and bubbles with disembodied heads, accented with script here and there ("Chicky Baby" for Dean, "King of Crazy" for Jerry) also invoke a past era of marketing. Her paintings revive a time when ads and packaging really worked at cementing your attention, instead of goosing desire with branding gimmicks. It was not any more or less sincere, just more interesting.
Come to think of it, Jackson's paean to those times might say something about the difference between old and new Vegas, too. Perhaps you're less likely to get killed for what you do, but you're more likely to die for being who and where you are, beat up for sick glory, shot down at a street fair. Maybe it wasn't so bad back then, after all.