"We have met the enemy," the comic-strip Pogo once proclaimed, "and he is us."
Hard to say who, or what, the foe might be in The Enemy Show at Dust Gallery, although it could be as entrenched and unexpected as the one Pogo identified. If it isn't "us" exactly, it's attitudes and ideals that corrupt from within.
At least it's tempting to read that into a piece like Jessica Starkey's "the Score," a shadowbox frame presenting, trophy-style, a green T-shirt with the box score, "Fat Girls—0; Skinny Girls 9." One of the surprises of the post-feminist era is the way in which athleticism, once a path of gender esteem, has neatly adapted itself to the demands of old-fashioned sexism, one calendar at a time.
A related interpretation might apply to two paintings by Carrie Jenkins, the show's co-curator with Starkey. "Hello, Lover" and "Not So Fast, Missy," depict in Jenkins' familiar, stylized manner, a purse-snatching encounter between two women. The narrative might be up to something else, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the enemy is a seeming ally. Jenkins' paintings sandwich a Plexiglas panel by Martin Durazo, an homage of sorts to Ed Ruscha, with white stencil lettering. The elaborate Gothic script, with a touch of irony, spells out the word "Scheisser," which is, shall we say, a scatological reference.
The enemy within might continue with two pieces by Sherin Guerguis, relief sculptures fashioned from strips of aluminum as three-dimensional line drawings. "This Honey's Showin' Off Some Pink" is more orderly and representational than "Miss Thang and That Sweet Walk," but both play into the post-feminist commentary theme. They bookend Kellie Barrie's "East: Sleeping," a color-print photograph showing the mirrored image of a woman asleep in a garishly decorated hotel room.
The enemy, perhaps, is less-specific in the other works here. It could be the brutal sun in Caleb Forbis' painting, applied directly to a wall, titled "Scarface," or it could be the ideals of a society that plants the foreground palm trees in a desert. Corporate culture is a possible target in "Yours Truly," a painting by Chad Brown that shows a disorienting double-image of a man in a soulless hallway.
In any event, the works here are mostly engaging, and move the viewer to seek the adversary close to home.
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The target is literal, and literally close to home, in The Nuclear Landscape at the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery.
Drawn from the Altered Landscapes Collection of Reno's Nevada Museum of Art, this show examines the blasted and tormented sites of the Southwest that the federal government has used for decades to develop and test nuclear weapons.
Of course, you do not have to go far from Las Vegas, about 65 miles, in fact, to find one. Photographer Peter Goin's color prints, each with overlaid Letraset titles, document some of the long-dormant locations of nuclear blasts at the Nevada Test Site north of here. "Sedan Crater" amply describes the earth-shaping effects of a blast, while "Railroad Trestle" testifies to the "test" aspect of the site—let's see what it does to a fill-in-the-blank.
In some photographs by Richard Misrach or Robert Del Tredici, it's inconclusive whether the subject was blasted by a weapon or by ancillary effects, such as abandonment. Most images are more valuable as documents than art, especially Sharon Stewart's project on the consequences of weapons development in Texas.
But in one spectacular color print, showing an empty room pierced by dots and slashes of light, Misrach captures the sinister essence of that brilliant flash and the program that brought it to our desert.