What I know about abstraction in art is not much. Sure, I get the bare-bones idea of it—the freedom to create something that’s not representative, to allow the creative mind to wander where it will—but the why of abstraction sometimes eludes me. (I blame the editor in me; if something doesn’t make sense to me, it needs to be rewritten and revised until it does.) But in curating Two or 3 Things I Know About Abstraction—a 12-artist group show now at the Summerlin Library gallery—UNLV fine arts professor Pasha Rafat has anchored abstraction to a value I can get my head around: connection.
“I wanted to bring these artists together, the younger artists who I worked with in the art department and [UNLV's collaborative] graduate program,” Rafat says. “Some of them graduated two years ago; some I worked with for maybe five, six, seven years.”
That list of artists is chockablock with prominent local names, including Nima Abkenar, Scott Grow, Christopher Jones and Cory McMahon. When asked to curate the show, Rafat began with a couple of ideas: bringing this group of artists together, if only in a distanced, COVID-y sense of the word, and creating a group show within the current specifications of the Summerlin Library gallery space, whose administrators requested that holes in the walls be kept to a minimum.
It didn’t take long for Rafat to decide that the show should comprise primarily sculpture and three-dimensional art (a practical consideration, so that most of the work could be placed on pedestals in the center of the room), and that the artists should stay clear of creating figures.
“We call it abstraction, which basically means nonfigurative objects,” Rafat says. “The idea of figurative and nonfigurative kind of goes back and forth every five years in the art world.”
“Tenuous at Best” by Maureen Halligan
The most unexpected thing about Two or 3 Things I Know About Abstraction is that, for a collection of pieces that aren’t supposed to be representative of anything other than the artist’s mind—and were created independently of each other—some of the works are closely aligned. One of the wood planks in Homero Hidalgo’s “Untitled” is painted with a lattice-like hatch pattern that’s seemingly in conversation in Maureen Halligan’s flashe-on-wood piece “Tenuous at Best.” Holly Lay’s “Pink Dragon’s Den,” a pink-and-red yarn piece that spills across the floor like a topography of connected waterways, is paired with Lisa Rock’s “Untitled (collage quilt),” a medieval flag-like fabric collage whose brilliant pink and orange stripes could well have dripped onto the floor.
Taking it a step further, there are two actual couples represented in the show. Fabric artist Jennifer Henry’s “The Protectress” embodies the pure fun of her aesthetic—a glass mannequin head peering out from among huge chunks of raw glass, her “hair” a cascade of aquamarine gift ribbon. Meanwhile, her husband, Brian Henry, best known for his vivid, multidimensional video art, offers the cheeky “Deep Sky Blue”—a notebook containing the HTML code necessary to generate that color on a monitor. And Ali Fathollahi and Nanda Sharif-pour’s “Ten57-Vol. 2” is a QR code linking to a vintage home movie, with overlapping modern-day footage (bit.ly/3qnGspv); it’s a tantalizing look at Fathollahi and Sharif-pour’s ongoing “Ten57” project, an exploration of the unique architectural and cultural aspects of their vintage Downtown home.
“They’re really interesting artists, all of them. And some of this stuff is very offbeat, I mean, the way the mind works,” Rafat says. “I don’t even understand it, and I really don’t want to, you know what I mean? You just feel it, like going to the opera. You feel the musical sound, even if you don’t understand [the language]. And that’s the way I’ve tried to look at this show—to respond to it, as opposed to trying to intellectualize it.”
Two or 3 Things I Know About Abstraction Through March 23; Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Summerlin Library, 1771 Inner Circle Drive, 702-507-3860.
