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.

I’ve had some good conversations in the past few days about this show and about writing, particularly writing about work one doesn’t like. In the case of Chad Brown’s paintings, I may have been too brief in talking about why they don’t work for me. So, to be fair, here’s some elaboration.

I can’t think of any contemporary landscape painting, especially with urban/suburban homes in them, that have something to say about the subject or about “now” in general. Artwork involving mid-century Las Vegas homes feels nostalgic to me. I love me some landscapes, but they tend to be older, from ages when landscape painting had more cultural currency. French Impressionism is a good segue here, because they are landscapes, but the real subject is the atmosphere, the sense of light and emotion, that the brushwork creates, and the brushwork itself. Chad’s brushwork in these pieces feels mannerist to me: it seems to mean something, but, for me, that something doesn’t come through. And the imagery in the neon piece could be interesting, but this, too, is buried under the problematic brushwork.

Talking with some of you about the show and particularly about Chad’s work has been very cool. I’m looking forward to more of this communal digging into artwork, from the stuff we like to the stuff we don’t.

Image courtesy of the Springs Preserve, copyright Andrew Cattoir

Over the weekend, I returned to the Las Vegas Springs Preserve with the intention of taking in the exhibition “Desert Chromaticity” at a more leisurely pace. I had attended the reception the prior Thursday and spent only a little time looking at the show and the work in the show, for there was much nodding, smiling, and avoiding-uncomfortable-silences to be done. The extended art-viewing that was to have taken place last Saturday would have infused this post with a more detailed response to the show than what follows. As it turns out, this post will instead open with the flying of my spendthrift colors way earlier than I intended in my blogging life.

The cost of admission for a local adult and two kids to see this art show is $20. Granted, these tickets would get us into the entire Springs Preserve complex, but none of us were in the mood for historical and science-oriented fare; in fact, only one of us was interested in seeing the art. So, as an budget-conscious gallery hopper, who is accustomed to popping in and out of art shows at will, we headed directly to the playground and fake-grass amphitheater, both of which were a good time.

So, a few impressions (gathered fleetingly at the reception) of the “Desert Chromaticity” art exhibition, curated by Mike Spiewak of the Springs Preserve. The show features eight artists from the Southwest, whose work demonstrates some aspect of the quality of light in the Mojave. This theme is broad enough to allow the inclusion of any artist I can think of, which, for my taste, is a good thing, because I can discard the curatorial subject and just look at it as a group show. Themed art exhibitions can be a good occasion to bring together works by different artists, but these themes tend to do little but generate a white noise that nags you when you’re looking at a mediocre artwork, and vanishes when you approach a good one.

Stephen Hendee’s large sculpture needs no curatorial statement to for it to make an impact. It reaches from the floor almost to the ceiling, and casts its graded internal light–evoking a desert sunset–on all surfaces, including the other artwork in the show, and the viewers. Seeing everyone looking warm and pink in its glow was a great pleasure of the show. I speak as an artist and a viewer, with my own set of art-viewing criteria, when I offer that this piece alone would have made a strong show. The sculpture sets its own terms anyway, by scale and by the light it shines. On its own, it could stretch out and relax, and give Las Vegans our own little version of Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 The Weather Project.

But here in the real world, “Desert Chromaticity” is a group show, and the other pieces have to fend for themselves in the quiet, rosy-fingered discotheque over which Hendee’s piece DJs. Much of the artwork is polite and tasteful, most are wall-mounted photos, paintings, and mixed media, and most want to be your friend. One exception is Chad Brown’s dark and glossy oil paintings, which not only look like they were all made with the same 3/4″ brush, but the imagery is at best forgettable. (As I go forward with these art-writing posts, I hope my criticism of works I don’t like come across as honest and not rude; we must mind our manners.)

A couple of pieces stand up to the Hendee ambiance. David Baird has some small sculptures in the back, presumably hiding where Stephen’s piece won’t eat them, that are oddly colorless and cubical, each resting on its own moony light source. I like the bluntness of Catherine Borg’s photo of an old boat awash in the desert. And, although I’m still learning Shawn Hummel’s visual dialect, I like his diptychs: a photo of what appears to be a blurry night cityscape in one piece, part of a car in another, each mounted above an aluminum panel with its own shiny automotive paint job. These works speak up for the urban Southwest car culture, a great source for human-made color. Moreover, like a polished roadster pulling up to valet at the Flamingo, Hummel’s pieces bathe comfortably in the light of the aforementioned mega-sculpture.

Overall, my friend JW Caldwell is right when he says that Stephen Hendee’s sculpture outshines, literally and figuratively, everything else in the show. Again, I have little to say about curatorial themes, so its success or failure is moot. The exhibition includes a few of the better artists in the Las Vegas area, and I recommend stopping in to see it, with cash for admission in one hand and orange-cancelling sunglasses (just in case) in the other.

“Desert Chromaticity,” Springs Preserve, Las Vegas, Daily from Jan. 16 to March 7