By Danielle Kelly
The May 1 opening of Aaron Sheppard’s Midway at the Contemporary Arts Collective was quite the party, a vaudevillian extravaganza of singing, sparkles and skin. The evening’s MC was the artist himself, dressed as half man/half woman, and the joint was jumping with beautiful ladies of every gender. Like on the Strip at sundown, fairy dust cast by the general fabulousness camouflaged any cracks, creaks and crumbling facades.
Don’t feel bad—it’s okay if you weren’t there. If you live in Vegas, you are there every day. Midway isn’t about the spectacle itself, but what happens after the spectacle: With the lights up, you can see the vomit in the corner and the stuff stuck to your shoe. Not unlike a casino at four in the morning—a little haunting, a little beautiful.
As an artist in New York, Sheppard toyed with forms of gender and sexuality at the intersection of underground or subcultural social customs. Via autobiographical paintings and performance, he inhabits the skin of fake rock stars and drag queens culled from personal history. Now a member of UNLV’s MFA program, the artist has a rich new American myth to mine: Las Vegas.
Like posters at the circus luring visitors into the big tent, the gallery’s street-facing windows showcase banners of “Mr. Murray Hill” and “Miss Dirty Martini,” each ripe with side-show promises. The carnivalesque exterior belies the barren lack of festivities inside, as Sheppard has transformed the main space at the CAC into a midway … after the show. The barker has gone, a refreshment counter stands empty, the game booth has no takers and a ride has seats waiting to be filled—literally. Although peopled with structures, the space is uncannily hollow, filled only with a distinct residue of the raucous human activity it promises to have once held. It’s like an amusement park after closing, strangely suspended in time, by turns empty, menacing and a bit sad.
According to the press release, Midway addresses Sheppard’s personal mourning of the pending death of Coney Island. The park is scheduled for partial demolition and refurbishment this fall with plans to be “modeled after the Las Vegas Strip experience ... [offering] rides, spectacle and glamour.” It is in imagery based on the park that the artist most effectively sets his melancholy tone. Two sculptures, “Luna” and “Steeplechase,” personify two long-defunct turn-of-the-century precursors to the park we know today. These monumental and forlorn fountains hover protectively over the orphaned Coney Island. The “statues” have a ghostly pallor and a clumpy, runny surface with a strangely erotic physicality. Like much of the work in the show, they appear as though they will fall apart at any minute. Water spurts from both bodies, emphasizing their fetishized sexuality as trickling water echoes cavernously through a room that seems much larger and emptier than it actually is.
Similarly doleful are two videos filmed at the park last summer, “Mermaid Parade 2007: Twins” and “Coney Island 2007: Wonder Work.” The former depicts two women as Siamese twins dressed in an old-fashioned swimming costume, twirling in circles and dancing the Charleston, while the latter is an endlessly spinning Ferris wheel. Black and white, the videos are like memories, and their swirling imagery suggests both a party waiting to happen and time standing still.
The installation is not without its flaws. Why is the music for “Mermaid Parade 2007” on a CD player in the middle of the room? The paintings and collages, while often achingly sexual and beautiful, seem an afterthought in the gallery’s problematic back gallery. If the artist wasn’t going to capitalize on the inclusion of two-dimensional work, why have it at all?
Still, the residents of Vegas should be particularly savvy to the exhibition’s framework. We are acutely aware of the life cycles of cultural myth—it is our bread and butter, and we trade daily in resurrecting, destroying or manipulating iconic Americana. But it’s misleading to access Midway via connections between Las Vegas and Coney Island, The real heart of the matter is a question posed by the work: What makes a spectacle? It is a contract between the performer and the viewer, but what happens to the spectacle when the viewer is gone? Or worse yet, the performer? Aaron Sheppard is this exhibition, and the silence of his physical absence is the most melancholy and deafening of all.