By Danielle Kelly
Sometimes it feels like Las Vegas is a person: a preteen girl to be exact.
She is by turns awkward and gawky, tripping over limbs that are a bit longer than they were yesterday, uncomfortable in unfamiliar skin. Other days she is elegant and graceful, wise beyond her years. As a microcosm of this effect, the art community appears to be experiencing a bit of an awkward phase of its own. First Friday is shifting, galleries are moving, and the Las Vegas Art Museum has a projected new home. In the midst of these shifts, the quality of artwork on view is richer and more varied than ever, a little less lowbrow, a little more art with a capital A.
Brent Sommerhauser’s Structuring the Invisible employs a very light touch that deftly manages to integrate the erratic hum and flow of the Clark County Government Center’s rotunda into the story of the work itself. The exhibition rewards studied attention with small surprises, the most obvious of which are the pencils—12,000 to be exact. Near the entrance of the space rests a writing desk, legs modified to appear as though it is tilting toward the center of the rotunda. Seven white pedestals of varying size radiate out from the center, each topped with low ripples and lovely, curling wavelike forms. Look closer and the swirling liquid reveals itself to be a matrix-like structure of shaved pencils. The artist glues the pencils together in a mass that he then carves into as one might a block of wood. So the sculptures themselves consist of two conjoined elements: the unique pedestal whose structure, angled like a sea bed, directs the flow of the wavelike form, and the resulting swell of pencil mass.
Why pencils? The artist manages to take this utilitarian object seldom noted for its aesthetic value, this “tangible material,” as he calls it, and “coax it into other forms.” Elegantly transformed, the pencils step into liquid. “Alone, one pencil is a simple, poetic device; a small, thin conduit for thought,” according to the artist. However, en masse, their singular physical identity as a writing implement disappears, and they seem to harness a kind of cluster of unused potential, what Sommerhauser describes as an “anxiousness and an urgency.” Writing with a pen is permanent, but the pencil can be erased. It sketches ideas, plans things. Psychologically, a whole mess of pencils not writing is a potent aesthetic experience. In lovely tandem is the simple fact that a wave is formed by a myriad of intangible and invisible conditions—sea bed slope, wind, temperature. The resulting pencil-waves buzz with all of these what-ifs: ideas not yet conveyed, marks not yet made and the collection of unseen contingencies that form those thoughts.
The sculpture “Sinking Desk” serves as a kind of entry point into the installation, melting down into the floor toward the “waves,” creating a kind of visual undulation. Previously, I have been ambivalent about the artist’s furniture-transformations (most recently on view last summer at the LVAM), in which he turns function on its head. What in past efforts has seemed a bit too neat a package in this instance provides a clear directive. In his statement, the artist describes a recent visit home to see his grandmother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Hidden throughout her house in shoeboxes and coffee cans were clusters of pencils. For the artist, the pencil became symbolic of “small hopes,” “unmistakable as tools in [his grandmother’s] struggle to communicate, full of potential.” The desk becomes the unstable symbol of notions and words unformed, rippling out into thought-waves of potential, reliable only in their impermanence.
An equally compelling, if not more lighthearted, material transformation was on view at Dust Gallery in Julia Venske and Gregor Spanle’s On It. Due to the gallery’s move to the Soho Lofts Downtown, the exhibition will unfortunately be closed by press time. It was undeniably funny, impressively fabricated and altogether suggestive of a maturing art scene. Blobs and globs crawled across the gallery and seeped through walls. A hand truck in a classically postmodern gesture appeared to unsuccessfully transport an amorphous white dripping heap. These organic clumps were tantalizing—highly finished and luscious, with an exceptionally plastic appearance that suggested they were cast or machined in some way. The work was actually carved from Italian lasa marble. According to Naomi Arin, director and owner of the gallery, the German duo sought out the purest white marble they could find in order to impart a synthetic look to the work, toying with its materiality and surprising the viewer with its handmade essence. The seriousness of the material coupled with awe-inspiring craftsmanship hummed with a playful silliness.
Grouped into five general categories, all of the sculptures had varying degrees of subtle irreverence. The “Helotroph,” “Gumfor Maufs” and “Schrumpels” all fit into the previous category of marshmallowy forms. Shimmying around the room, oozing from beneath the wall—are they taking over the space or attempting escape? A separate group of forms, the “Smurfs,” were small bubbled objects also made from marble and equally mobile in appearance. These little guys were much more endearing than their blue cartoon namesakes. The accompanying video of animated Smurfs added to the sensation of innocent, multiplying forms squeaking their way toward world domination with virtual, unknowable identities. Part of an ongoing project begun in 2001, each has a “unique size and personality,” the artists claim, and they are “spreading globally.” The mysteriously organic quality of the marble was put to nice effect in the animated “Smurfs.” But what were they for? Why did they multiply? Did they replicate in direct proportion to global anxiety, maintaining a kind of universal psychic equilibrium? Was I reaching?
The final category of objects, the “Orophyts,” provided a few answers. Seussian and monumental in glittering bronze, the forms looked like—well, they kind of looked like towering golden lumps. The collection was placed on mirrored pedestals and flanked on each wall by tall mirrors, so that from most angles viewing the work included looking at some part of yourself ad infinitum. You could also simply bypass the work and just look at yourself. Luminous, sparkling and egocentric, this work was made specifically for Las Vegas, and no other like it appears on the artists’ website. Again, questions: Was the work teasing out a critique of a flashy, bloated art market, mirrored pedestals with indecipherable bronze forms and funny oozing marble?
According to Arin, the artists are very motivated by contrasting “luxurious material with industrial spaces, thereby questioning the form and definition of luxury.” I was way off-base. The work is not a critique, but more like a prompted question about luxury as luxury. It’s not about bronze; it is bronze. And art—to make it, to see it, to buy it—is a luxury. Visiting Dust directly on the heels of Sommerhauser’s exhibition, I was so busy looking for alternate meaning I forgot that sometimes something simply is what it is, and that can be rewarding in and of itself.
Two sophisticated shows, two very different offerings. Both raise the bar in a young art town. Ah, Las Vegas, our little girl. She’s all growed up.