Ever since the fall opening of Brett Wesley’s current Downtown gallery, the Cube, the space has engaged Las Vegans in experimental and experiential art—which begs for inquisitive, curious audience members and their participation. Local artist, muralist and native Jerry Misko expands on that theme with his latest exhibit, All the Spots & All the Dots, with what he calls “an exercise in crowd sourcing to inform a random visual narrative.”
Like most of Misko’s work, All the Spots is an exploration of Las Vegas—bright colors, neon and gambling—but this latest batch uses “classic Las Vegas vernacular,” specifically, the rules of craps, to determine the exhibit’s outcome. Even the name, which Misko says is a slang term for rolling a 12, is a nod to the game.
Inside the gallery space, the exhibit’s title—in giant, red letters—recalls Downtown’s iconic high heel, while a green box with instructions is projected onto a separate wall. Guests are invited to play a rudimentary version of craps, with their dice rolls recorded for future Misko drawings. The crowd-sourced results might be random, but the process reveals more about Las Vegas than the artist anticipated.
“We just grew up knowing how to play the game, even as kids,” Misko says about craps. “Now, maybe two [gallery visitors] knew how to play the game even a little bit, and nobody had any deep knowledge of the game. I was expecting for it to evoke nostalgia, and I ended up finding out it was a learning process.”
As a result, All the Spots is an unexpected commentary on the shifting attitudes of Las Vegas and its old-meets-new, classic-meets-post paradigm. “I guess as Las Vegas got bigger, fewer people are in the industry,” Misko says. “There’s a lot more restaurants and clubs. [Gambling is] becoming a smaller subset of what Las Vegas is. Millennials aren’t a gambling generation.”
Soon, the nearly bare walls of the Cube will be filled with Misko’s geometric renderings—and another unplanned but welcome result. “I knew there was going to be a pattern,” Misko says, “but like a language, you can see the rules inside [it]. Like if you had to go through and analyze the pattern and re-create the rules—if aliens landed on the planet 2 million years later and found these—you could go back and re-create it.”
Jerry Misko: All the Spots & All the Dots Through May 30; Thursday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m.; free. The Cube, 1025 S. 1st St. #150, 702-483-8844.
