Thank heaven for that cliché of which artists are so fond, that it's up to the viewer to see what he or she wants in a work.
You could, for instance, walk into the Cindy Barnard's show at the Donna Beam and suspect she is steering your attention to a polemic of sorts. Several images of improvised musical performances—in an outdoor courtyard, in a CD shop—interpose themselves among splendid, large-scale color prints depicting civic band shells at moments of desuetude and snowy quiet. From the mezzanine, you hear the audio track of a video in which contemporary individuals take turns reciting testimony from a 17th-century satirical inquiry.
The Inquisitive Musician, a collaboration with David Hatcher, employs a text that pits an informal street musician against a trained court musician, the instinctive and common vs. the trained and favored. You can't help interpolating the dispute's theme into the visual sonata below. The civic band shells are barren hollows, several amid fields of snow, whereas the lively performances happen in unexpected spaces. For instance, "August 25th, 2001 (No. 1)" appears to take place at the Schindler House, an architectural landmark in West Hollywood, in an experimental-music series Bernard organized through her group, the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound.
These images of activity are titled by date, whereas the band-shell images are titled by place, as if to suggest that the formalized presentation of music from the Western canon is more static, more place-oriented, than the lively time-happenings of avant-garde music. In any event, the places civic groups built for summertime concerts of Sousa and Tchaikovsky are voids, and people avidly attend the activities on unlikely stages.
But this might be too much to infer. Bernard's prints of the band shells, despite their dead-center presentational aspect, are oddly charming. They fill with your expectancy, and in a sense, Bernard conducts concerts in your head.
So it's up to you, viewer—and listener.
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Few more unexpected spaces for the display of art can be found than the second-floor gallery of UNLV's Richard Tam Alumni Center, whose interstitial walls offer Go Figure, a selection of figural works by MFA candidates.
All the work is top-notch, not least Wendy Kveck's two large-scale drawings of women bent double on a sofa, each titled "Crouch." But No. 2 is executed, apparently in watercolor and pastel, in richly lurid reds that lend the figure an anguished aspect, whereas the more earth-toned drawing seems placid.
But photography is the highlight of this small show. Sam Davis' C-prints of dimly lit, soft-focus figures are dreamlike, almost nightmarishly green. Chris Waters' C-prints, "Inside and Outside the Lobby," depict a young man in both spaces of a low-rent hotel. "Inside" is particularly disturbing: dark-toned, with ocher and turquoise competing for prominence while a big-screen TV faintly proclaims the brand-name, "Progresso."
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Then there's Gallery-Au-Go-Go, Dirk Vermin's no-brow salon. The Valley's most unusual and refreshing gallery offers I Only Have Eyes For You, Jennifer Spear's large-scale portraits of famous female stars. Apparently done in airbrush, with equal nods to graffiti art, comics and high-end car adornment, Spear's horizontal paintings zoom in on the eyes of such stars as Clara Bow, Joan Crawford and Elizabeth Taylor. Given that Spear's other works here depict less-familiar skin models in more, um, full-bodied poses, the star-portraits stress that the eyes have it. Crawford is garishly green with rose highlights, whereas Bow, a star of the silent, black-and-white era, is given rich, warm life tones, and a tear. An air of retroactive grrl power pervades, and it's grrreat stuff.