At this late date, citing installation art to confirm an urban art scene is like pointing to an affinity for the Beatles to prove you're hip. That said, it was refreshing to find a First Friday embracing two serious attempts at installation art. That neither was entirely successful seems incidental to the evidence of a fledgling metropolis playing catch-up with its more-sophisticated coastal cousins.
The collateral carnival that clusters around Downtown's monthly gallery fest, in full stride for last week's third anniversary, amounts to a kind of installation/performance-art exercise on its own. Unfortunately, it stepped on the toes of one installation: Dark Gallery at Contemporary Arts Collective was quite bright because, as gallery director Natalia Ortiz explained, the city frowns on well-traveled but dimly lit spaces. And CAC was something of a thoroughfare last Friday, people striding past the well-lighted, empty walls, largely unaware of the sound installation dampened by their clatter.
Down Main Street, the human stream funneled through Stephen Hendee: False Dawn at Dust Gallery, mostly bemused and perhaps a little befuddled. Hendee uses milky plastic panels and gaffer's tape to build interior environments, as he did to engaging effect two years ago in UNLV's Grant Hall Gallery. There he fashioned a cramped and somewhat menacing little warren with colored lights behind the plastic panels and lines of black tape on them suggesting electronic schematics. At Dust, a large, flat, rectangular panel leans against each side wall, also backlit and festooned with black tape. Here, the tape renders boxes filled with Xs, as well as seeming diagrams of systems and architectural plans. Toward the end of the gallery, a tunnel forms, leading to the back room where a suite of Hendee's drawings is displayed.
Without cue, most visitors would not find in this the critique of contemporary sales spaces that Hendee intends, although given that information, the critique resonates. Whether for a tony boutique or a voguish ultralounge, interior design has become branding-by-atmosphere—otherwise, it's all just cloth and liquor. In an alcove of the tunnel, as if to bring home this point, the words "Dead Mine" mark a dead end.
The point might emerge without help if the leaning panels did not seem so work-in-progress, implying rather than shaping the space. And an irony intrudes: The tunnel leads to a display of Hendee's drawings, which are for sale. Nothing wrong with that, of course; it's a gallery. You could argue, though, that Hendee's environment also tones the merchandise. Well, you could if you enjoy logical conundrums of that sort. Fortunately, these works are tight and tough nuggets of condensed energy, crystalline and kinetic, and succeed regardless of environment.
Dark Gallery wasn't quite dark the next afternoon either, but the opportunity was improved to absorb the installation undisturbed. From artists and teams here and elsewhere, curator David S. Curtis collected sound recordings that fill the storefront space in lieu of art on the walls. You hear two people playing a board game, courtesy of Earl, a.k.a. Andrea Buckvold and Chris Wildrick, while a short violin and piano sonata, contributed by Dan Murphy, warbles away, Josef Ulbrik dispassionately narrates the story of an evening spent ironing while watching Monday Night Football, and so on.
It is an auralscape that calls your attention to the volume—literal and figurative—of sounds that fill your ears but escape your notice every day, thanks to the facility to tune out distractions. As you listen to each, you hear but ignore the others. It's an interesting although not particularly compelling conceit. The sounds are engaging enough but the novelty eventually wears thin.
Still, the willingness to take on this kind of exhibition is a good sign.