Every year Clark County has a juried exhibition of local art, usually judged by a single juror, often a relative newcomer to Las Vegas and an advocate for and possibly maker of cutting-edge art. This year’s juror, Stephen Hendee, is both. He’s a UNLV art professor whose own work is conceptually oriented, and some of his choices can seem incomprehensible to folks who aren’t steeped in contemporary art theory. The titles can be more interesting than the artwork but, thankfully, aren’t always.
My favorite title, “Problemlessness,” is a photograph by David Sanchez of a sun-dappled and rippling aquamarine pool with floating beach ball. I love saying problemlessness, with its imperfect rhyme and alliteration of lem and less, and the addition of the rhyming suffix ness, making the word a tongue-twister. The enlarged photo image is cut into 5-by-7-inch pieces and pieced together in columns separated by narrow black strips.
Buffalo Yo’s antic title “My Future House ... After World War 9 or 10” conveys optimism and pessimism as he survives war to build a house—but in what kind of world? The work is a large mixed-media construction of colorful felt strips, a faded tie-dyed sheet, a needle-nosed protuberance and randomly placed hemispheric “windows” that emit a reddish glow. The “body” sits precariously on thin metal legs placed at awkward angles and would be at home in a show of outsider art. It is well-made and slapdash, high- and low-tech, dynamic and sedentary, and to paraphrase Robert Frost, not some “unity of opposites” but images through which multiple oppositions flash forth. In this case, images both grotesque and beautiful.
The title “Creeping Eruption” is an example of uniting opposites—slow movement and sudden occurrence. The paint does seem to erupt throughout Wendy Kveck’s semiabstract, figurative work. I sense a valiant attempt to reassert the dominance of painting, which since the 1960s the art world has declared dead many times. Regardless, painters keep painting, not always on canvas, sometimes with unusual materials—pigmented wax, spray guns and squeegees, to name just a few. Kveck has remained true to the tradition of stretched canvas and oil paint but has juiced it up with thick eruptions of colored polyurethane foam, applied in the manner of a pastry chef, if the pastry chef was Jackson Pollock.
Speaking of Jackson Pollock, canvas and squeegees, J.W. Caldwell starts each painting with Pollock’s signature canvas splatter technique, then squeegees on a layer of color before attempting the serious business of illusionistic painting. His two entries—“Flap,” a cowboy astride a bucking bronco, and “Shipwreck III”—depict subjects close to the artist’s heart.
And there’s method in his madness; the splattering “relaxes and loosens him up.” (Until recently I was a teacher of art to young children, and I can tell you they like nothing better than to splatter paint and use rollers.) In Caldwell I see a little boy whose imagination is fired up by images of cowboys and shipwrecks, a young art student who learns to draw and paint in a traditional way, and an artist whose intuition tells him to let us see the child in the man. The effect is wonderful. The pastel-colored splatters form a sort of frame around the periphery of the image, the squeegeed area has a lovely uneven edge, and the subject matter is lovingly rendered.
“CIPOTA” means little girl in Salvadoran slang and is printed in stencil-style letters under Hoshabel Cortez’s digital self-portrait. The central portrait image is a clever appropriation of the iconic 1968 Che Guevara poster, but she has enlarged and transposed the small star in the Che poster into a crown-cum-halo of vivid red—stunning against the black-and-white portrait. Although the poster often provoked outrage, the message here is simple: Idolize me.
The grand prize winner may provoke outrage of a different kind. The work is a large mixed-media construction by Danielle Kelly titled “The Fury and a Flicker (Itzpaplotl).” The alliteration of the F sound is nice; but I had to look to the Aztec/Mayan reference for help in decoding this piece. Itzpaplotl is the obsidian butterfly goddess, the soul crystallized into rock of women who have died in childbirth. The artist has taken strips of knitted material and hardened them with black latex enamel to form a chaotic skein of intertwining loops, creating a Rorschach test in which you can see anything or nothing. After doing my research I can see the trajectories of butterflies and severed umbilical chords, but I get no aesthetic pleasure from the work itself, which seems to be beside the point.
The Grand Juried Exhibition
Winchester Cultural Center Gallery
Through August 3
3130 S. McLeod
455-7340