Art

Lascaux to las week

Installation art takes center stage in LV

Susanne Forestieri

Installation art, the once-renegade art form that’s now a staple of museums and cutting-edge galleries, has its roots in the oldest known art—the prehistoric cave drawings in Lascaux and Altamira. Although installations in galleries are temporary and cave drawings permanent, they similarly engulf the viewer in a transformed space. Framed paintings are out, at least as stand-alone objects, and architecturally integrated, conceptually complex installations are in. In the modern epoch, mechanical reproduction robbed the art object of its uniqueness, and photography has usurped its function as a representation of reality. In response, artists have sought and found another path, by emphasizing ideas (conceptual art); the product co-opted by commercialism becomes less important than the creative thought.

Installation art, with its complicated narratives and/or immersion of the viewer in an enveloping environment, is part of that movement.

The most conceptually complex is the Jean Lowe installation at the Dust Gallery, where The Loneliness Clinic is a papier-mâché pseudo-realistic re-creation of a psychiatrist’s office, from a waiting room filled with magazines and self-help manuals to the doctor’s desk and writing pads. Lowe has an interest in how design, aesthetic style and personal belongings reinforce power and status. In this instance, the midcentury modernist furniture designs of Le Corbusier, Eames and Mies van der Rohe convey a cool, professional detachment, while the shelf of historical iconic art reproductions mark the doctor as cultured and refined. Ultimately, upon closer inspection, this pretense dissolves in a plethora of humorous diplomas, bogus credentials, bound volumes of absurd disorders and magazine articles. For me, the coup de grâce was the wall display of faux yellow legal pads filled with notes on the condition of the “patients.” At the bottom and in the margins are erotic doodles that reveal the “doctor’s” (not the patient’s) subconscious and serve to completely level the playing field.

The subconscious, a place of primal emotions and fears, is prominently on display at the Arts Factory. The common area—an irregularly shaped, dim space not unlike a cave—has been a hodgepodge of unrelated artwork, miscellaneous furniture and magazine racks. Thankfully, it is now being curated by artist/gallery director Caesar Garcia, and he has transformed it into a coherent viewing environment. Four artists, including Garcia, were assigned walls for display of their work, and also tasked to create frescos that complemented their paintings. The effect is stunning. Garcia’s work covers several walls, but the largest grouping has a military theme. Heralded by frescos of gas-masked soldiers and weapons, his mixed-media works on wood panels develop this theme further. The precise images transferred from weapons manuals, combined with fine-lined drawings and aerosol mists of subdued colors, give the subject a surprisingly delicate cast.

Daniel Bennett introduces his wall with a large cartoon-like figure whose gaping maw seems to disgorge an array of paintings and photographs of widely varying interest and skill. However, one in particular caught my attention, a mixed-media piece that cleverly incorporates sample Formica chips into a quilt-like pattern overlaid with figurative images. But the crowd favorite seems to be his painting of a patently angry bear being pursued by a horde of candy-colored robots.

Ryan Tino, aka Cultslinger, has the most dramatic wall, with a giant black bug menacing a horrified damsel in distress, which frames the horror-movie-themed paintings. The artist known as Ruck, who also painted the wall outside the Arts Factory, has a display of spray-painted larger-than-life faces.

If illusion is your bag, and I confess it’s mine, Tom Pfannerstill’s trompe l’oeil carved-wood paintings of packages, wrappers and boxes at the Trifecta Gallery are fascinating and precise in every detail, from the advertising images and logos to the dog-eared corners and accumulation of dirt. For those who ask why he bothers, Pfannerstill himself is at a loss to explain. I think a partial explanation can be found on the back of each piece, in his meticulous documentation of the date, time and place of each acquisition of trash. We have an awareness that we won’t be here one day; the anxiety this causes can be allayed by the creation of objects that will live on after we are gone. By lovingly memorializing the least-valued objects—the epitome of disposable goods—Pfannerstill makes the mundane marvelous.

Installations in the Arts Factory common area and Trifecta Gallery

*** 1/2

Through

September 28

107 E.

Charleston Blvd.

676-1111

The Loneliness Clinic

****

Through

October 21

Dust Gallery

1221 S. Main St.

880-3878, dustgallery.com

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