I unabashedly love group exhibitions, not just for the variety of media and styles, but also for the opportunity to spot new developments and trends. This year’s Las Vegas Art Museum Art Roundup offers, among its many pleasures, an epiphany in photography and the new art medium of video projection. Painting and photography have long had a reciprocal relationship, but judging by this exhibition, their roles seem to be reversed—photography, once a tool to document reality, now embraces an abstract lyrical sensibility associated with painting; meanwhile, painting has returned to its prephotography role of meticulously recording reality.
An exemplar of photography’s new role is Linda Alterwitz’s atmospheric “Desert Light”: not the blinding glare of the noonday Mojave, but slashes of light across subtle gradations of color, from blue to purple and black, suggesting a midnight escape across the desert. Contrast this with Ashlee Fletcher’s painting “Open Road”—a detailed rendering of a car crossing the desert, well observed and painted but lacking poetry.
Poetry in motion could describe Mark Grothman’s “Digital Landscape,” a video projection accompanied by new-agey electronic music. It looks like a large bar graph of hills and valleys, but with the added illusion of movement as bars disappear and appear more or less in time to the music. The impression is like fingers running across a piano keyboard—the effect is mesmerizing.
Mesmerizing in a different way is Helga Watkins’ “Vegetative Replication,” a screen print of intertwining vines that plays with the idea of a decorative motif run amok. (We tamed nature and made it decorative; now it has its revenge.) Vicki Rosenberg’s photograph “Lines” takes the opposite tack: Slender, arching reeds and their reflection form a symmetrical composition of graceful lines in Zen-like contemplation of nature.
Kyla Hansen’s untitled installation tames nature and puts it in its place. The work consists of a series of wall-mounted, open-ended boxes lined with bucolic-patterned wallpaper, surrounded by a swarm of lead foil origami butterflies, one of which has alighted inside a box. Metallic butterflies are disturbing, which I think was the point. Hansen’s other installation, “Resurfacing,” consists of a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper backdrop and several large linoleum origami-spiked dodecahedrons arranged neatly on the floor. I don’t know if I get the concept or if there is one, but you have to admire anyone who can fold linoleum into complicated origami shapes and hang wallpaper from a 20-foot ceiling. Repurposing of materials is another trend in contemporary art. Brent Sommerhauser does so beautifully with his “Placemark” and “Wedge.” Both are made from salvaged materials; the former, a small wall hanging constructed of strips of painted wood, delights the eye with a rich texture of flaking paint formed by years of wear and tear. The latter is a free-standing construction of salvaged drawers reconfigured into a wedge shape, handles intact. It has a strange poignancy, as, robbed of their purpose, the drawers carry bravely on in a new incarnation.
Mary Lou Evans uses black to great effect in her large charcoal drawing “Sitting Solely.” She skillfully suggests an unseen narrative by the use of strategic details; a seated young woman in evening wear, shoes kicked off, hair slightly disheveled, holding a single rose, meets the viewer’s eye with a sultry boldness.
Another woman goes beyond bold to defiant—“Delilah Watching Samson Getting His Eyes Gouged Out,” by Erik Gecas, is an oil portrait of stunning honesty: The fierce blue eyes, stern lips and ashen complexion show a woman to be reckoned with. Eschewing any pictorial references to the biblical story, Gecas wants the viewer to concentrate on the telltale facial expression.
Facial expression is an important element in Debra Cootware’s acrylic portrait “Greg at Sun Down.” It depicts a man seen in profile, a big smile on his face and the collar of a Hawaiian shirt just visible within the frame. Profile portraits are usually serious affairs meant to be reproduced on coins or heirloom keepsakes, so the smile comes as a nice surprise. The title, the shirt and the smile makes it easy to imagine the vacation snapshot from which this painting was done.
The exhibit is a wonderful breath of fresh air in a stifling summer. Spread out over three galleries, the arrangement gives each work the space it needs. I’ve noted a few of the works I particularly liked, but there are many other enjoyable pieces, including graphite drawings by Daniel Samaniego and traditional scenic and still-life watercolors by excellent artists.
56th Art Roundup
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Las Vegas Art Museum
9600 W. Sahara Ave.
360-8000 Through August 25