The five sculptures of Teetering on the Brink

John Bissonette has mounted an exhibition of new sculpture in the great stone hollow that is the Rotunda Gallery, where not only the physical space but most of the viewing public, passing through because of some inconvenient piece of civic business, are ambivalent to such art shows. Bissonette has experienced this dubious relationship first hand: one of his prior sculptures was damaged in the course of a recent group exhibition in the gallery. The piece, titled “Thanks” and featuring those words in the artwork, took a sarcastic turn after the incident, which saw a styrofoam chair break as if from a bar brawl. A serendipitous accident, and as of my last visit to the gallery, unrepeated in the new show.

This effort, entitled “Teetering on the Brink,” features five human-scale sculptures made from materials that, in their various ways, evoke a fragility that feels specific to Las Vegas. Styrofoam, drywall, a mirrored closet door, an abused shopping cart, some glitter; some if not all of these materials would appear in a Las Vegan’s top ten list of stuff that comprises our city. Styrofoam is the standout ingredient here, a material that Bissonette has carved and glued to represent, at full scale, 1) a 6-foot utility ladder, 2) a wrought-iron chandelier, and 3) a vase and floral arrangement atop a narrow table.

Discussing the styrofoam’s qualities is both obvious and necessary, because the material hits a target in this context that I never saw until now. Clearly, it is a brittle, fragile, formally temporary yet chemically eternal substance; and, that it depicts both objects of construction and interior design in these pieces highlights how those qualities shape Las Vegas’s dynamic economic duo of development and tourism. Bissonette’s gesture of depicting iconic yet banal Vegas objects in styrofoam avoids a minefield of cliches by being modest and straightforward. The works lack the pretension of a topical social agenda through their craft: while they are not spot-on perfect likenesses of what the pieces represent (webs of hot glue here, clunky lettering there) the sculptures embody the artist’s labor and care. These are proudly hand-made objects.

Grey contemplating the used-car-lot-flags that frame this styrofoam depiction of a ladder.

More importantly, I think, is the play of stark white styrofoam against the different textures of earth-tone stone in the gallery. Material connotations are beautifully reversed here: wide, glossy brown floors and high, rough-hewn stone walls feel cold and sterile as the background for artificial, yet hand-crafted styrofoam, the softness of which becomes human, even sensual. The long, curving arms of the chandelier sigh a little breath of life as they sag and bend under their own weight. The ladder is rigid but friendly, and the vase and flowers, against the deep red background trimmed with white molding, is frankly more lovely than any arrangement you’d find in the Bellagio or Palazzo.

The physical poetry of these pieces in this particular environment makes your gut say, “mmm hmmm, yes,” so that you can start to think about the clearly local implications of this artwork from a quiet place, a mental lotus position. Rounded out by a post-minimal, drywall-paint-mirror piece, which is a different kind of formal antidote to the infinitely stone gallery environment, and a shopping cart that buckles under the weight of its full glitter-load, the show reminds me of a quote by Israeli-born artist Michal Rovner: “My affinity is to not judge, not even to comment. I only ask questions and wish for peace.” This aesthetic stance is not for every artist, but something like this comes to mind as you walk among these sculptures. By way of criticism, I would suggest that this show’s title goes too far in commentary and judgment, for while the works here do teeter on the brink of just lasting the two month duration of this exhibition, the phrase also transcends the show and admonishes Las Vegas for its multi-tiered fragility. This fin-de-siecle tone needs no statement here; by virtue of the work alone, the exhibition handles nuances of vulnerability, haste, permanence, and care.

Click here to watch John Bissonette talk about this show.

“Teetering on the Brink” at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery through March 12.

A group show of emerging artists has the great benefit of the romance of potential: you enter the gallery a little more open to the chance of pleasant surprise, and if nothing gives you that unexpected zing, you leave the gallery knowing that the artists are young yet, and maybe next time one of them will dazzle you. For me, this is the case for the 4-person exhibition at CAC in the Arts Factory, which is aptly named “Tomorrow People,” a nice title which vaguely suggests procrastination but vigorously states the premise of the show, to present some young artists who have their eyes on the near future.

The works–by Leah Craig, Catherine Cruise, Justin Favela, and Thomas Willis–are nicely curated and well placed in the space, with ample elbow room for the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed media works to do what they need to do. Any view of the show encompasses works by most or all of the artists. And each of the artists has a distinct mojo that, like Kiss’s face makeup, offers a clear choice so you can pick your favorite.

Works by Willis, Cruse, and Craig

Mine is Leah Craig, particularly her odd wall pieces made with thin sheets of fused plastic. These are new and experimental works, full of that lusty potential, but still hanging on to elements of her drawings, particularly the use of a meandering, delicate line. While this line work evokes half-remembered ideas in her more conventional drawings on layers of translucent paper, in these tattered plastic things the line feels unnecessary and distracting. This said, these pieces have a visceral, Eva Hesse-like presence, especially the large untitled piece, which dispenses with her drawings’ delicate linear descriptions of familiar neighborhood footpaths and goes for the blunt embodiment of the moment when, out on those same streets, a gust of wind blows a plastic grocery bag into your face.

Justin Favela uses similarly modest materials to far different effect. His large, cardboard-and-paint signs draw on the neon-powered aesthetic of the Vegas Strip and a flippant, Spanglish humor. Estardas is a pulpy reincarnation of the old Stardust sign featuring the piece’s title, a nice Spanishized mispronunciation in place of the original hotel name. Across the gallery a smaller but double-sided sign reads Hella, Hella, Hella Bomb! with a kind of joyful gusto that makes you wonder if you’re in on the joke. A pallet of 1,095 mixed media tamales, all aluminum-wrapped, completes this trifecta of light-hearted swagger, which after the reflexive smiles, leaves you with the suspicion that, having just shared a laugh with someone who speaks another language, maybe he wasn’t laughing with you. This impression could be a shortcoming of Justin’s pieces, but the attitude, the humor, and the different uses of language point to the possibility that an ambiguous hostility is at work, and that would be a cool thing.

Grey checking out Favela's Estardas

Catherine Cruse is the traditionalist of the show. Two untitled watercolor drawings and two large oil canvases feature the nude female figure reclining and twisting in familiar poses. The drawings have a freshness and facility, while the paintings sag under the weight of a lot of paint and a lot of hours with the palette knife. Works like these, which have some elements working for them (pretty good color and form in the figure) and some elements not working (harsh lines separating figure from ground and absent content outside of the figure itself), remind us of how hard it is to pull off a naturalistic oil painting and how tricky it is for a contemporary artist to contend with the masters who invented the rules of the game that Cruse seems to be playing.

Thomas Willis’s works also have elements of naturalism, but in a dreamy modern context. The two bigger pieces feature images of keys, cell phones, and other pocket contents, arranged in a tight radial pattern. Rather than painting these objects on the white background of each piece, he masks and reveals the intricate parts of the image, then burns the exposed gesso. This technique is impressive, especially in that it accomplishes the rare feat of using tape to mask a painting without leaving ridges when tape is removed, ridges that have been the bane of many a west coast art viewer (and artist) for decades. The result feels like it was made with an archaic camera or a new x-ray technology for airports, and the tone of these pieces is of delicate observation to the immediate environment, like a poet sent into reverie by a paperclip, or the Flaming Lips lyric, “driving home the sky accelerates and the clouds all form a geometric shape.” Something romantic is happening in Thomas’s mathematical arrangement of everyday objects. Focus and ingenuity notwithstanding, these pieces feel like they are still on their way somewhere, and that place may well be awesomely weird.

In all, “Tomorrow People” doesn’t give it up so soon in our new relationship with these artists. The potential is there, and the show is a good flirt, flashing glimpses of what we may have a chance to lay our eyes on if we all keep showing up. Turning potential into great art is a rare and flighty thing, but we want to see what happens when these artists take it all off, so we’ll keep showing up. Tomorrow, people.

Works by Favela, Willis, and Cruse. Grey heading towards Favela's 1095 Tamales.

“Tomorrow People” at Contemporary Arts Collective, in the Arts Factory, February 4th – March 19th

Grey and I visited Angela Kallus’s exhibition of new paintings at Trifecta Gallery last week. It is a compact affair, as all shows must be in Trifecta’s space, which always feels snug, nestled in its Arts Factory corner. Angela treats the space sensibly, grouping the work in three clusters, one to a wall, leaving the windowed-wall free and white.

All of the pieces are square, and we can split them into two groups, Flowers and Circles, two familiar manifestations of her non-painterly paint handling. Blue Roses and Yellow Roses, the two Flower pieces, are each 32″ squares of arranged acrylic roses, hand-made as if by a baker icing a floral cake. The flowers are of various small sizes and various tints of blue in one piece, yellow in the other.

Angela has made paintings in the Flower style over the years, and while their surfaces have an impressive impact, they are pretty quiet on the wall. These rose painting read instantly, and they don’t keep giving back on further looking. The pastel palettes make me think of those comfy velour sweatsuits that women still haven’t stopped wearing while running errands; which is to say, they evoke the cozy and the cute. For my part, I can imagine some strange and engaging effects if more colors were introduced into these pieces, so that each rose becomes a brushstroke in a more dynamic, spontaneous kind of painting; we could call it Abstract Confectionism. Or not. Overall, these paintings are mild-mannered, and could use a little rudeness.

The other 21 works in show (all untitled) are in Angela’s Circle style. Evoking vinyl records and targets, and buzzing in tight concentricity before our eyes, each piece is a square panel with a circular motif centered on it. Some are black monochrome, some black and white, many are painted in bright colors. Angela achieves the concentric effect by using a trowel, or a similar tool, to pull lines through wet acrylic paint, somehow turning on an axis and leaving perfect tight rings on the panel. On close inspection, you can see that she then paints over the textured substrate, which, like the Flower paintings, results in a bas-relief pseudo-painting.

These Circle paintings, which Angela has also been making for a few years, have always hit me oddly. Sometimes they feel over-refined, like the result of a Modernist drive to purge all unnecessary detail from the artwork until the bare minimum remains. The square and the circle appear in all of these pieces with minor variation; the texture is the next crucial ingredient, which varies a little more from piece to piece; and, at last, the color can vary quite a bit among paintings. This is a tightly controlled game, in which you play in the details and you’re not sure how to win.

In spite of the work’s extreme focus, it’s a good time looking at the Circle pieces, particularly as they hang in the Trifecta show. The works, mostly 12″ squares, are grouped tightly–12 hang together on the main wall–and the high contrast, intense color combinations, and tight line work bounce your eyes around until you look away for a short rest before jumping back in. The concentric circles achieve a vibrating optical illusion even when you focus only on one piece, but it gets better when you look away to a new painting and the after image from the prior piece follows your gaze and hums over the new piece. What happens is like a performance in which your eyes move back and forth around the group, and your experience of looking unfolds over time: for me, this is not static art, but temporal and cumulative, which is unexpected, and can’t happen when one of these paintings hangs alone. This exhibition shows these works in the best situation that I’ve seen them in, a buzzing codependence.

I should mention that some of the black and white pieces introduce variation in the shape of the troweled paint. These wide and wobbly outermost paint rings are fun and awkward in their unpredictability. However, it looks like she still paints over the textured acrylic, so you feel the artist’s control reasserting itself over the serendipity that generated the odd shapes. These looser texture-shapes work well and suggest broad possibilities in future works, but I think the pieces would preserve a welcome freshness if they could marry the irregular shape to a more spontaneous application of color. If it’s possible to pull off the texture and the color all in the same pass of a trowel, this may be a way to push the immediacy that these new, nicely weird works imply. 

The works in this exhibition exude a “what you see is what you get” reticence that is characteristic of Angela’s work. In the case of the Flower paintings, what I see isn’t enough to engage me, especially as they quietly flank the vibrant grouping of 12 intense Circle paintings. But these and the rest of the small Circle paintings have a strong chemistry as they hang together in the show, and they suggest that the process of minimalist refinement that gave us these pieces is now opening into strange possibilities, the kind of thing that we art-freaks live for.

Angela Kallus’s new works show at Trifecta Gallery, in the Arts Factory, February 4 – 26. Go see them in person.