Fine Art

High Noon’ showcases the Mojave’s vast, spectacular flora and fauna

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Myranda Bair’s “Beetles, Bones and Stone”

Lovely yellow flowers sprout up from the soil inside a tiny terrarium. You inch closer and see a camouflaged tarantula crawling towards you. Don’t worry—these 3D paintings are only a representation of the Mojave Desert’s vast and spectacular creatures.

Myranda Bair's "Spring Fever (Tarantula on Glass)"

Artist Myranda Bair’s upcoming exhibit at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery, High Noon, will showcase the local desert’s animals and plants like the tarantula, the roadrunner, beetles, bees, yucca plants and more through her mixed-medium artwork.

“The whole basis of this exhibit is to foster the importance of conservation, of looking and being an active participant in the environment without destroying it,” says Bair, who grew up on a farm in rural Texas, where people sell turnips from their pickup trucks. But after living in Nevada the past four years, she has become very fond of the desert. “It’s so fragile yet also so harsh. It’s amazing how many animals actually live and thrive here.”

Bair says the Government Center is the perfect place to display her environmentally conscious art, which was built around the surrounding landscape. “The rotunda itself even looks like a terrarium, but one for people,” says the artist. A majority of her art is contained in small terrarium-like containers, which emphasizes the idea that nature is to be enjoyed but not tampered with. The backs of her watercolor artwork are left white as a symbol of what happens without conservation—a stark contrast to the colorful, layered paper on the reverse. “We love creatures, we love looking at them, but we’re not hospitable to them. [The blank back] shows that one day they could be gone.”

Myranda Bair's "All That Glitters (Roadrunner)"

Although a majority of her art is handmade, some materials she uses are real pieces of nature, like the coated, black-tailed deer bones in “Beetle, Bones and Stone.” “It’s good to consciously remind yourself that [nature] is better left there in that space, but the real materials I use I try to get responsibly,” Bair says laughing, adding that people often bring her strange items like vertebrae and other bones.

Inside the rotunda, the exhibit’s works—along with beehive towers (which will be donated to a bee farmer in Pahrump at the exhibit’s close) and a variety of felt and cotton cacti—will be arranged to create a clock face. This refers to the High Noon title, and the idea of a standoff, conveying that it doesn’t have to come to that point—that we can care better for the environment now.

High Noon May 16-July 8, Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery, 500 Grand Central Parkway. Artist reception May 20, 6-8 p.m.

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