The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] presents its summer exhibition, New Crop, with work by six northern Nevada artists at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery from June 5 – September 4, 2012. CCAI will host a reception for the artists on Thursday, June 7 from 5 – 7pm. During the reception the artists will give an informal talk about their work beginning at 5:30pm. The Courthouse is located at 885 East Musser Street, Carson City. The exhibition and reception are free and the public is cordially invited.

The artists in the exhibition are Amy Aramanda, Kaitlin Bryson, Logan Lape, Kath McGaughey, Emily Rogers, and Karl Schwiesow. The six artists bring a variety of media and ideas to the exhibition. Through his interest in the environment, Lape built a solar-powered machine will create a drawing in the gallery during of the exhibition. Photographer Rogers begins viewers’ travels at known Reno sites and connects the past and present through forgotten details of previous residents with current images of the home. McGaughey focuses her art on the narrative of things frequently overlooked including the loss of public recognition of mourning a loved one. The energy potential of objects and materials motivated Schwiesow’s creation of two the large ceramic bell structures. Through her large quilt built with discarded library card catalog cards, Bryson focuses viewers on the rituals in everyday lives. Aramanda uses photography to challenge viewers’ knowledge of painting masterworks as she gives the paintings a bath of contemporary culture.

Lape and McGaughey graduated last year with their BFA degrees from Sierra Nevada College [SNC]; Schwiesow will graduate from SNC with his BFA degree later this year. Aramanda and Bryson graduated this month from the University of Nevada Reno [UNR] with BFA degrees; Rogers is a graduate student in the Art Department at the University.

Writer Sarah Lillegard wrote the exhibition essay for New Crop. Lillegard manages the visual art programs for The Holland Project in Reno and earned her BA in Art at Walla Walla University. The essay will be available online at arts-initiative.org and in the gallery during the exhibition.

New Crop is made possible with lead donations from Wally Cuchine and the Hop and Mae Adams Foundation. CCAI sincerely thanks them for their generous support.

image: New Crop artists [l-r] Logan Lape, Kath McGaughey, Emily Rogers, Amy Aramanda, Kaitlin Bryson

With Words and Wool

As a fiber artist, the first step Lexi Boeger takes in every project she embarks on is to ask: “What is the pertinent fiber?” Sometimes the question relates to how she wants a specific artwork to function. Other times, it relates to the location or the nature of the project. Then, Boeger asks herself: “What story can the fiber tell?”

For her project STAND at Saint Mary’s Art Center, she found her answer in the Nevadan landscape. The force of Nevada’s plains and mountains was so dominant that she felt her artwork just had to tie into it in some way. Once that decision had been taken, it was clear that the “pertinent fiber” for her project had to be local. And in researching local fiber, Boeger thought of the wool shorn from the thousands of sheep herded on Nevada’s windswept mountains by Basque sheepherders.  

During much of the twentieth century, thousands of men and women left the green valleys and low mountains of their native Basque Country in northern Spain and southwestern France to seek their fortune in the New World. Many came to work for the ranchers of Nevada. The tough life of these young men, many of whom only spoke Basque, has been recounted by celebrated Nevadan writer Robert Laxalt, himself the son of a Basque sheepherder, in his book Sweet Promised Land.

In the heyday of this industry, sheepherders would be placed in charge of a flock of one to two thousand sheep and sent off to roam the wilds of Nevada and connecting states in search of fresh grass for fodder. Accompanied by their faithful sheepdog and a mule, they would spend months in isolation, broken only by weekly visits from the camp tender who brought them food. When resting from the heat and rigors of their daily life, they found solace in the shady aspen groves. There they marked their presence by engraving their names and their thoughts in the soft bark of the trees.

Boeger, who grew up in Placerville, California, had been vaguely aware of the Basque sheepherders as a child. On fishing expeditions with her father in the mountains, she would come upon their tree carvings. At the time, however, she had not been able to decipher these inscriptions, many of which were in Basque.

When she began thinking of wool as her material for her CCAI residency at Saint Mary’s, she says, “The images of these trees kept tugging at the edges of my thoughts.” As a body of informal artwork, she saw how they bore silent testimony to the contribution of a group of immigrants to the creation of Nevada, as we know it today. Similarly, the wool that came from the sheep that they reared created a link between the past and the present.

“I realized,” she says “that the fiber itself has a heritage and a story to tell, and it’s a cultural one. In this history, there’s not only the fiber but an entire legacy of artwork, created by the Basque shepherds during their time on the range.”

The rich variety and depth of the Basque sheepherders’ carvings on Nevada’s aspen trees has been empathetically recorded by another Basque American writer, Joxe Mallea Olaetxe in his book Speaking through the Aspens. To tell the story of these immigrants through her artwork, Boeger decided to re-create a grove, or stand, of aspen trees. The armature for the ‘trunks’ are made of recycled and organic material Boeger gathered around Virginia City. The hand-felted wool provides the ‘bark’ on which the story is ‘carved’.

With the help of Marie Louise Lekumberry, of the J.T. Restaurant in Gardnerville, Boeger obtained wool from two local Basque sheep farmers, Jean-Pierre Izoco and Ted Borda. Brown wool came from Rambouillet sheep and cream-colored wool from Merino sheep. Using humidity and heat, she pressed the untreated wool, still with bits of vegetation and dirt from wherever the sheep had happened to roam, into large thick sheets of felt. The lighter-colored Merino wool provided the surface of the ‘bark’ and the darker Rambouillet wool an under-layer.

For the carvings, Boeger then distributed portions of the felt to representatives of the various Basque communities in Nevada, including Reno, Winnemucca, Elko, Ely and Gardnerville, inviting these people and their friends to ‘carve’ into the sheets of felt with small sharp blades. By scratching the cream-colored surface, the brown under-layer was made to appear, giving an effect similar to that of the carvings on the aspens.

Some of her present-day ‘carvers’ are direct descendants of the original sheepherders who lived and worked in Northern Nevada. Their contribution to the work links them to the Basque ‘artists’ of the past through the common thread of the fiber. “Though the environment has changed since the days of the sheepherders,” Boeger notes, “people’s need to respond to it hasn’t.” Her artwork provides an opportunity to respond in a way that respects the customs of the past while honoring the voices of today. “The idea is not to replicate the tree carvings of the past, but, like the herders who responded to their environment at the time, to engage with and reflect on the present.”

Today, sheepherding is no longer a widespread activity in Nevada. From the 1970s on, declining prices for lamb’s meat and wool reduced its profitability. In the Basque Country, economic conditions improved and emigration from the area slowed to a trickle. But many Basques have remained in Nevada, establishing themselves as American citizens and diversifying their professional activities.

As the title of Boeger’s work suggests, STAND is as much about them as about the Basque sheepherders of yesteryear. The word is not only a reference to a group of trees: it also evokes having an opinion, an attitude or a belief, or a poise that enables a person to exist and to prevail. As Boeger points out, “when a person makes their mark, in this work or anywhere, they are making a stand, in an attempt to transmit meaning through their images and words, some of these are simple, some poetic, some are grand. But all of these messages create the cumulative voice of community.”

Zoe Bray, Ph.D.
Center for Basque Studies,
University of Nevada, Reno
May 2012

Artist and anthropologist, Zoe Bray, PhD, wrote the exhibition essay for STAND. Bray is Assistant Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada Reno. She earned her Doctorate in Social and Political Science at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy, and a MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Lexi Boeger has published three books on the art of hand-spun yarn and co-designed (and engineered by Majacraft) her own purpose-built spinning wheel. As a yarn artist, she works with all kinds of fiber, tackling plastic, scrap paper, twigs, anything that relates to the theme of the artwork and the place it is conceived for. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from the University of California at Davis. In February 2012, Boeger gave a CCAI Nevada Neighbors talk about her work at the Carson City Library. She lives at her family’s winery in Placerville, California, where she runs a small community-based spinning studio. 

top image: an assistant helping the artist to felt the wool
middle image: colors of felted wool
bottom image: Zoe Bray

The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] and St. Mary’s Art Center [SMAC] are delighted to present the exhibition, STAND, a salute to Nevada’s Basque arborglyphs by fiber artist Lexi Boeger. The installation is the culmination of Ms. Boeger’s two-week residency at St. Mary’s and will be in the center’s 4^th floor gallery from June 2 – July 8, 2012. CCAI and SMAC will host a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 2 from 4 – 6pm. St. Mary’s Art Center is located at 55 North R Street, Virginia City; the gallery is open to the public Fridays – Sundays, 11am – 4pm. The exhibition and reception are free and the public is cordially invited.

As a fiber artist and yarn spinner, Boeger was intrigued by locally grown fibers and Nevada’s rich Basque sheepherder traditions. “The Basque … have a history that defines them and is afforded a great respect ….” During the residency, Boeger will create a contemporary version of an aspen grove like the ones where the resident Basque sheepherders enhanced tree trunks with arborglyphs or drawings on the trees’ bark. She will recreate the aspen trees using found materials to build trunk-like armatures for the trunks and felted wool from local sheep as the bark.

Inviting Basque community members from across northern Nevada to carve on her felted wool tree bark, Boeger explained, “As for the markings themselves….people do not need to be artists to do it. Many of the original carvings are very simple. Just a name, or a date. Maybe a simple statement or figure. Those groves are powerful because they are a record of many simple, peaceful, individual moments. I think anyone participating in this project should think of it that way. Just carve what they feel in the moment they are with the felts. the weight is not on any one person to carve a grand thing, it’s going to be the whole collection of many voices that will make it powerful.”

Boeger described the project stating, “I think this project references the past but is [also] about the Basque of today. The original groves are the inspiration for the form of this artwork but not the content. This grove will be made from fiber shorn this spring, 2012, and raised by the current generation of shepherds. It is new. And so it is an appropriate place for this generation to make their mark. It’s a way for the community to express their cultural identity without defacing or competing with the past.”

Boeger has presented her works in New York, Tokyo, New Zealand, Vancouver, Norway, and many other cities here and abroad. She is an originator of the hand-spinning genre often referred to as Art Yarn. Boeger has written Handspun Revolution, 2005; Intertwined, 2007; Hand Spun, 2011. She earned a BA in Fine Art at the University of California at Davis and lives with her family in Placerville, California.

Artist and writer Zoe Bray, PhD, wrote the exhibition essay for STAND. Bray is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada Reno. She earned her Doctorate in Social and Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a MA in Social Anthropology & Development at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Dr. Bray’s essay will be available online at arts-initiative.org and in the gallery at St. Mary’s during the exhibition.

top image: two colors of natural wool felted and carved by the artist
middle image: the artist felting the wool
bottom image: felted wool

The Capital City Arts Initiative’s [CCAI] Books & Writers series invites you to attend a reading Friday, April 27 with David Toll, an award-winning local writer reading from Breaks, Brains & Balls, which he co-authored with Joe Conforte. The free events will take place at the Carson City Library’s Auditorium, 900 N Roop Street, Carson City, Nevada. A reception for the writer begins at 6:30pm followed by the reading at 7pm. The Carson City Library and CCAI co-sponsor the Books & Writers events.

David Toll co-wrote Breaks, Brains & Balls with Joe Conforte, one of the most outrageous characters ever to emerge from the American west. Joe Conforte, who made Nevada’s Mustang Ranch the biggest, brightest, and most famous whorehouse in the USA, maybe the world. Mr. Toll will give the reading. Mr. Conforte will not attend.

In the book, Joe Conforte tells the story of his life in the same bold way that he has lived it, and he shares the secret of his success. Joe’s story might have been written by a 20^th century Horatio Alger . . .  the penniless immigrant boy who comes to America, runs away from home and in 1942 makes his way west to Los Angeles to seek his fortune. By the time he’s 18, he’s driving his yellow convertible to Tijuana on weekends for the gambling and the bullfights. By the time he’s 30 he’s opening a place out in the sagebrush east of Reno, where three counties come together near the Truckee River. He named it the Triangle River Ranch, and the rest is, as Joe likes to say, “. . . mostly myth.”

David W. Toll is a prize-winning Nevada journalist, the only living newspaperman to begin his career at The Virginia City Chronicle. He also worked for The Territorial Enterprise and in 1974 helped revive The Gold Hill NEWS from a 92-year slumber, completing a journalistic hat trick not achieved on the Comstock Lode since the 19th Century. His writing has also appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers, and for the past 30 years, in Nevada Magazine. He is author of The Complete Nevada Traveler, the first guidebook to the state since the WPA’s 1939 guide; now, after a dozen editions, it is still a bestselling book about Nevada.

[photo of David Toll]

An Exquisite Balance

“Let the beauty you love be what you do.
There are a thousand ways to kneel
and kiss the earth.”         Rumi (1207-1273)

An inquisitive nature can function like a religion. The curious soul is a devotee of consciousness and understanding. These themes, drives, passions—whatever one may call them—are not denominational or specific to a certain religion, but rather the proverbial carrot on a stick for those driven by a need to know. These searchers may sometimes be viewed as irrational, but never lazy. The drive to investigate and learn is never sated. The searcher searches until he or she is no longer.

The French Oulipo author, Georges Perec, wrote: “What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?” (L’Infra-ordinaire, 1973)

This call to action, or, call to obsessive inquiry, is not out of line with the process of many artists. Without such research and growth, we are not challenged to look ahead, behind, aside, and underneath. This seeking tendency is more the territory of mad scientists and Romantics.

Mark NeuCollins has an unusual blend of intelligence, gentle personality, and absolutely childlike spirit. His hair appears to have gone gray far too young, then you realize he isn’t in his early 30s but his early 50s. Born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Indiana, NeuCollins has a sort of ageless persona, simultaneously youthful and wise. A keen intellect matched with a sensitive worldview make for an artist that challenges and implores viewers to reflect on their own potentiality in the universe.

His process is one of seeming contradiction: part obsessive organizer—mapping, cataloging, and analyzing—and part free spirit, driven by desire and longing.

For his 2011 Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] residency at St. Mary’s Art Center, NeuCollins took a typically thoughtful approach. Bringing only a set of hand tools, he aimed to create a site-specific installation using all materials found in the area. Leading up to the residency he also noted that he, “fully expects plans to be affected and amended once in Nevada.”

In an email update from Carson City, NeuCollins evokes the Perec quote: “I found this ‘mind mapping’ software a little while ago, and since that time I have been rather obsessively mapping the ideas involved in the “1000 Ways” installation. Every day this gets added to, things get deleted, things get moved around. It’s my attempt to figure out how these ideas fit together. Many of the relationships are unstated. This morning I stepped back and realized that creating this map is a parallel activity complimentary to the meaning and understanding that I get from the physical creation of the piece…”

For this project, he allowed the natural splendor of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert to determine the work being made. Initially he gained a sense of the place by visiting the area for his preliminary artist talk. But, true to form, he anticipated the human propensity to change and evolve and allowed the work to take final form in situ.

Mandalas made of earth, sagebrush flags, a gateway of found materials; he attempts to incorporate all of the senses. A gong includes the viewer in the ever-evolving installation. NeuCollins notes, “A gong is traditionally used as a starting and ending point to a meditation session.” This meditation session speaks to global cultures and religions without committing to one. The deep palette of the landscape grounds the mandala in Virginia City, while the conceptual roots of the work grow from celestial themes. Perhaps the whole point here is reverence.

A self-directed student of world religions, NeuCollins approaches these quotations with sensitivity and deference. He is interested in the ways in which different people appreciate the world around them.

The relationship between one’s art practice and one’s worldview or politic is, naturally, an intimate one. In this case, a sort of radical empathy that permeates all aspects of the artist’s perspective influences his artwork.

NeuCollins acknowledges his practice has shifted from his earlier, overtly political, new media work to work that is highly charged with personal politics. This quiet evolution, from media artist to more environmentally focused one, is a product of experience and maturation.

While NeuCollins has always had a commitment to environmentalism, recent events made him spring into action. He was present in Iowa City, Iowa, in 2008 for the 2nd 1000-year flood in his 23 years of living there (1993-2011). The second flood inspired an immediate concentration on environmental issues. This more focused attention creates a sense of urgency that isn’t as apparent in his older work.

Keenly aware of extinction and temporality, and not merely in the au courant green way, his conscientiousness and genuine mindfulness make for introspective, erudite work that hints at the universal. NeuCollins retains aspects of his previous approach, but has moved on to what he considers the next phase of his art practice.

NeuCollins speaks of collectively harnessing our potential as producers. Here, the sensitive philosopher links his artwork and politics via a faith in human agency. In some ways he sees this residency as a first step toward reconciling the grappling he’s done negotiating between his art and political convictions.

Hands are a recurring theme with NeuCollins. Images of the artist’s hands demonstrate his interest in visceral, physical work and perhaps also hint at his preoccupation with the passage of time. A skilled carpenter and Rhode Island School of Design graduate in Industrial Design, it’s no surprise when he mentions, “What I do with my hands is my soul work.” In these hands are history and experience.

In seeming contrast to all of this physicality is the cerebral, meditative core of NeuCollins’ current body of work. Here we see, and feel, the effects of time and consideration. Gongs, sound, participation, subjective unconscious, archetypes, Carl Jung, biology, sociology, architecture; he is quick to list some of the many thoughts behind his process. He mentions being inspired by Buckminster Fuller and adds, “Fuller made no assumptions about the way things should be.” This absence is something the two seem to share.

NeuCollins is pulled between his interest in Conceptual art and his desire to build things with his hands. In turn, this desire begets desire for material objects imbued with deep concept. This conceptual bent may be partially informed by NeuCollins’ M.F.A. degree in Intermedia from The University of Iowa; but this could be a chicken or the egg-question.

Repeatedly he mentions how when struggling for something really ephemeral, it’s easy to miss. Always the truth-seeker, NeuCollins creates charts to explain his trains of thought.

The exquisite balance, the sweet spot—as NeuCollins calls it—where the physical object supports the concept, is the goal of so much research, of so much work. Possibility and struggle permeate NeuCollins’ practice. Maybe this metaphysical wrestling with time and existence is just what Rumi meant about kissing the earth…

As an artist, NeuCollins seems to have found this sweet spot, if only for a minute. For he, of all people, would be the first to point out that there is no stasis here. Like a mantra, NeuCollins reminds, “Everything changes. We aren’t on this earth forever.”

Katie Grace McGowan
Rijeka, Croatia
June 2011

Katie Grace McGowan is a media artist and writer based during Croatia in summer 2011. She says, “a smattering of her work can be viewed at www.katiegracemcgowan.com.”

A Hybrid of the Brash and the Curious

Mick Sheldon’s origins are no mystery in his series of paintings, Still Lifes for Cowpokes. Having a certain familiarity with the landscapes and objects of the West translates effortlessly into the traditionally classic genre of still lifes. The conscious irony of the title of the series is simultaneously humorous and intriguing. These paintings are for the West. Sheldon himself sees the familiarity in these works: “The skulls were my cowboys.  The cactus became sugar pines.  This made it all clear and it was funny and attractive and accessible and then it got kind of exciting.”

Sheldon’s self-described ‘lost youth’ of “dead-end jobs everywhere” lends itself to the persona of the cowboy. Nomadic and insatiable, Sheldon is a hybrid of the brash and curious character of the cowboy—yet also the thoughtful and dedicated artist. He allows himself to be consumed by his passion, utilizing his extensive education and impressive experience as an artist to fully engage with his work on a daily basis. He has worked in various mediums over the course of his career, from hand-colored woodblocks, assemblage pieces, sculptures, and rich oil paintings; all of which display his artistic talent.

The skulls in Still Lifes for Cowpokes echo the skulls and timepieces found in still lifes popular in the mid-seventeenth century: still lifes designed to emphasize not only the artist’s ability to master the different textures of the chosen objects, but also to convey the transience of time and remind us of our own mortality. Sheldon’s inclusion of skulls perhaps suggests this fleeting quality of life and the harsh reality of the American West, but also the steadfast and timeless characteristics of the region itself.

The works in this series come after a period of creating mainly figurative works in the nineties for Sheldon and their beautiful renderings both harkens back to the classics of art history and embrace the contemporary artscape of today. Simultaneously employing the ironic combination of what is sometimes perceived as the ‘pretentious’ still life and the subject of ordinary objects, Sheldon intentionally aims these works at the inhabitants of the West: the cowpokes. Playing with the juxtaposition of the personage of the rogue cowboy and the unmistakably traditional still life creates a fourth dimension in these paintings—a fusion of past and present represented through time.

Though his body of work includes strong themes of politics, social justice, parody, and allusion, at heart there is a sense that Sheldon has always possessed some of the untamed qualities of a cowboy. When he did not have a press of his own, he drove over the woodblocks and paper with his truck to produce his prints, then colored them all by hand. The rogue cowboy and the serious artist combine within Sheldon, generating a magnetic quality that draws the viewer in for a closer look at his work.

In these still lifes, however, there is a sense of returning home, a sense of getting back to some personal beginning, focusing on content, arrangement, texture, and color. There is an intense focus on the objects that fill the canvas, pulling the viewer into the painting and carrying a new narrative for each composition.

Sheldon’s selected objects feel at home: their arrangements and colors create a sense of comfort and familiarity with the West. Sheldon’s palette reflects the earthen hues of the environment in which he roamed in his youth—his “cowboy days,”—utilizing greens, browns, yellows, and dusty reds.

The refreshing differences between the textures shown in these works—the pieces of glass, the cacti and the luxurious fabrics—combine to give the viewer a feast of imagery and color which truly becomes a sensory experience. The shadows of the glass in Admiring the New Cowboy Hat recall a sunset casting shadows on the land, while the fabric in One Pulls Two Through the Flooded Canyon is sensuous, tactile, and, as Sheldon describes it, has a “liquidic feeling of sexuality in the folds.” The textures in One Pulls Two are intoxicating. Sheldon’s “contrasts of tactile sensations” are tangible to the viewer in his simple yet compelling arrangements.

The objects themselves create the personality in each scene. Their textures and movements within the compositions create a fluidity that energizes and enlivens each painting. The visible light sources add an element of reality, while the individual personalities in the skulls and cacti lend the paintings narratives that spark the viewer’s interest—as in Standoff at Lone Pine. Two sides, one of bottles and the other of gourds, separated by a lonely cactus, face each other poised for action, creating palpable tension within the composition. And yet the lamp and fabric remind the viewer that it remains a work of still lifes, no matter how much we want a gourd to make a move.

Similarly, Admiring the New Cowboy Hat on Top of Three Lookouts Mountain refers to the geography of the West, the landscapes, and the scale. Reminiscent of Camel Rock near Santa Fe, New Mexico, the emotional embodiment of the objects physically creating and representing landforms evokes the experience of being outside. Sheldon’s exquisite renderings of his subjects allow the viewer to truly sense the vast landscapes of the West, creating a sense of open space even through his use of close proximity to the subjects and the crowded feeling of “claustrophobic hi-way traffic,” as Sheldon describes it.

These are Sheldon’s first observational paintings. Though still lifes, Sheldon believes that “painting is not about photography. It’s about painting.” This statement is reflected in the emotional qualities of his work. Each object can mean something different in each composition. His work is open to interpretation: “I’ll do half the work. You do the rest.”

Now a tenured professor at American River College, Sheldon spends his time painting, teaching, and serving as Director of the college’s James Kaneko Gallery. He describes Art as “a driving force that when you have it, it won’t let you go.” When he is not inspiring his students (who “haven’t liked painting still lifes of brown things”), he spends at least six hours a day during the semester and up to fourteen hours a day in the summers and winters dedicated to his work. As an alumnus of the University of Nevada, Reno, and holding an M.F.A. from UC Davis, Sheldon is erudite both in his field and in the geographical region that holds his attention in this series.

All of the paintings have titles that are arguably equally important as the compositions themselves. Each piece on display is somehow augmented by Sheldon’s choice of words. He uses this language to discern the actions and ‘characters’ in his arrangements, which are humorous, descriptive, and honest. Sheldon provides context for the actions of the bottles, cacti, skulls, and gourds, turning the ‘still life’ into life itself. The meaning of his work may change upon reading a title like Discovering the Gully Where All of the Animals Go to Die or Landslide Behind the Line Shack. Inanimate objects are transformed by his words into dynamic characters, flooding waters, tall trees, or mountains.

Although elements of humor can be seen in these recent works, Sheldon’s serious approach to his work and highly skilled technique cannot be overlooked. His commitment to and love for his art are equally demonstrated through his process, which takes around sixty hours for each painting, not including the hours for framing. The devotion to art as an integral part of who he is as an individual is evident throughout his body of work—and his ability to remain playful with both his use of visual language and titles, regarding both subject matter and self-identity, sets him apart as one of the most important contemporary artists in our region.

Still Lifes for Cowpokes grew out of an assignment he gave to his students; it was about “a human being looking at a table full of junk, moving the junk around, moving it around again and then drawing or painting those pieces of junk.” Sheldon sees the still life as essential, “if for nothing else, then for something to ponder and to wear around our heads like a ten gallon hat.” He invites the viewer to reflect upon his work:

“If you find yourself chuckling or out-loud laughing at my work, it will be okay. The humor is infused as a kind of way for everyone to be able to walk right into the image, get comfortable, put their feet up and stay for awhile. Take a look at the work. Enjoy yourselves and go home happy.”

In whatever sense one views Still Lifes for Cowpokes, its quality and splendor evoke meaning for us all. Experiencing Mick Sheldon’s work is experiencing a part of the West, past and present, enveloping you in a world you already know, but perhaps have not seen quite like this.

Phoebe Finch
Reno, Nevada
September 2011

top image: CCAI Courthouse Gallery installation view of Still Lifes for Cowpokes
bottom image: Laughed out of the Rodeo, oil on canvas over board, 36″ x 48″, 2008

]]> http://arts-initiative.org/2012/03/still-lifes-for-cowpokes-%e2%80%a2-phoebe-finch-essay/feed/ 0 http://arts-initiative.org/2012/03/elapsed-in-time-essay-%e2%80%a2-chris-lanier-a-sense-of-majesty/ http://arts-initiative.org/2012/03/elapsed-in-time-essay-%e2%80%a2-chris-lanier-a-sense-of-majesty/#comments Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:12:21 +0000 Asa http://arts-initiative.org/?p=1825 The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] is honored to present Elapsed in Time, an exhibition by artist Jenny Robinson at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery, February 9 – May 18, 2012. In conjunction with the project, media artist and writer Chris Lanier has written the following exhibition essay. CCAI extends its appreciations to Jenny, Chris, guest curator Galen Brown, the Carson City Courthouse, and all those involved in the exhibition.

A Sense of Majesty

The exhibition Elapsed in Time, featuring work by printmaker Jenny Robinson, has a genuine sense of majesty. The prints she has on display are large, most of them over 30 by 50 inches – much larger than the usual print. They command the space they are displayed in, showing off a real technical brio. For Robinson, the scale is mostly a matter of format meeting subject matter. The prints at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery display big, mostly neglected structures: Gasometers, highway underpasses, abandoned rollercoaster tracks, water towers. The structures are massive, but they are also, in the context of their environments, generally unnoticed – hidden either by design or by obsolescence. Robinson’s prints reveal how these giant structures appear after they have stopped being looked after, and stopped being looked at (of course, Robinson herself is still looking).

Robinson works up her prints from sketches that she makes on site, aided by some photo references. Her studio is in the Hunter’s Point Shipyard, an industrial section of San Francisco – a perfect theater for her interest in abandoned architecture. It is a zone of constant dereliction and renewal – buildings that have been empty hulls for years can suddenly vanish, seemingly overnight. Robinson seems drawn to this sort of quixotic moment in a building’s life (a “moment” that can span a decade or more): when a structure that so forcefully asserts its permanence gives evidence of its actual impermanence.

The artist that immediately came to my mind, looking at her prints, was Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), the American photographer and painter (Robinson only became aware of his work a few years ago). Sheeler was fascinated by the formal elements of American industry, photographing Ford’s River Rouge Plant outside Detroit, or making paintings of power stations, under commission by Fortune Magazine. He loved the geometry of the factory, of the machine – recognizing that utilitarian forms can have a great beauty.

Of course, Sheeler’s paintings and photos are invested with a sense of industrial optimism, even utopianism. Several decades later, that utopian dream has shaded into something of a hangover. If Robinson’s prints do not offer a direct rebuke to Sheller’s industrial images, they certainly offer a skeptical aside, or an interesting tonal counterpoint. Both artists give their subjects a frank monumentality, but where the geometry of Sheeler’s buildings seems clear and clean, Robinson’s prints are soaked in an atmosphere of corrosion. Rust colors, streaks and speckled textures not only describe the surfaces of the structures, they extend into and infect the empty air around them. The space surrounding the buildings is often clotted, heavy with dark ink. While the structures remain standing, their edges fend off the weight of that ink, staving off a final collapse into black obscurity. The prints seem like they have been etched on the sides of flattened oil drums, the stains of their toxic contents bleeding through.

Though the texture of the prints almost revels in toxicity, Robinson has cultivated a non-toxic printing process. There is a degree of self-preservation to adopting non-toxic methods: “In England, when I went to college, I’m sure it knocked ten years off my life. We never had any ventilation, we were breathing up the acids as we made our plates.” When she moved to California, about a decade ago, there was more “green” consciousness about such processes, which pointed her toward new techniques.

Printing at her current scale would ordinarily involve etching a large copper plate with acid. Rather than dealing with the expense and ponderousness of copper plates, Robinson’s “plates” are illustration board, sealed with varnish. She carves into the surface to make the lines for her images, in a dry point technique. The colors are built up as washes, in four or five passes of a monoprint process. Besides being less toxic than working with copper, this process is far quicker, and more immediate. She usually completes a plate in about a week, with the printing done in following weeks.

Her Brighton Pier East (2011) has a certain ghostliness. It depicts a Pleasure Pier in Brighton, England – with “all the icing cake design,” as Robinson put it – that was gutted by a fire about a decade ago. After that, storms stripped it down further. “It’s more beautiful now,” Robinson said. “It almost looks like a blueprint, the original drawing for the original building. Through decay and time and destruction, it looks like a drawing in the middle of the sea. It’s just gone back to its bare bones.” The image speaks to the allure of the dilapidated. That vacancy gives us license to inhabit it. Even if there is police-tape or a “No Trespassing” sign barring our way, we are somehow invited to let our eyes and imagination wander there.

It’s true that Robinson has more of an interest in the backside of signage, and the undercarriages of overpasses – but that doesn’t amount to a real exposé. She literally reveals the underbelly of industrial systems, particularly those linked to distribution and transportation, but her affect is more factual than muckraking. She’s not sneaking behind a public facade in order to point out some hypocrisy, pulling out the diminutive man behind the curtain – she’s more interested in structure, the sort of architectural engineering it takes to keep the facade aloft.

Her Grand Lake Theater (2009) shows the back of the Grand Lake Theater sign in Oakland, with the reversed letters scored vertically and horizontally with metal bars, an imploded crossword puzzle, carving up space into cramped little rectangles. You can see the same fascination with compartmentalized space under the swoop of the track in Rollercoaster (2008), the latticework of the support beams fragmenting into almost abstract patterns, a shrapnel of crosses and triangles arrested in the air.

Gasworks, London (2011) tiptoes toward dispensing with subject matter, while remaining entirely figurative – the print shows the skeletal metal scaffolding for a gas tank, though the tank itself is gone. It’s a giant birdcage whose bird has long flown. What remains is a description of vacant volume in a combination of circles and squares. The abandoned gasworks has taken up the role of the visual artist – its only function now is the framing and composition of space.

Her portraits of Gasometers (the one in the show, Gasometer, Blue (2009), is featured on the show card and at right) were quite liberating for her as an artist. “The turning point for me was when I started doing the Gasometers,” she said. Before them, “I traveled a lot, I was in India and I often would do these beautiful, and a bit romantic, watercolors… I sold everything I did, but to be honest I was almost embarrassed about it…

“I freed myself from that and decided just to do what interested me, like the Gasometers. I remember thinking, ‘Nobody is ever going to want to buy a Gasometer.’ But actually my work has really taken off since I did those prints, because it freed me of the feeling that I ought to be doing artwork that pleases people. I enjoy my work much more now because I do what I want, regardless of whether I think people will like it or not.”

Chris Lanier
Reno, Nevada
March 2012

top image: Tethered, 2012
center image: Brighton Pier East, 2011
bottom image: Gasometer, 2009

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Nevada Neighbors, the Capital City Arts Initiative’s ongoing series of illustrated public talks, will host Marjorie Vecchio, PhD, Curator of UNR’s Sheppard Gallery. Her talk, As the World Turns: Artists and Global Events, will take place Wednesday, March 28 at 7pm at the Carson City Library, 900 N Roop Street, Carson City. Preceding her talk, there will be an informal reception for Ms. Vecchio at 6:15pm. The presentation and reception are free, and the public is cordially invited.

In this presentation, Dr. Vecchio will address changes she has seen during the past decade in young art students, as well as mounting pressures that artists and art institutions face in light of political and social uncertainty. She will discuss the challenges that face artists today, both in their daily lives and in educational possibilities, as well as in the content and form of their actual work. She will offer a view of our roles as fellow artists, viewers, art administrators, and neighbors to each other during these difficult and unstable times.

Marjorie Vecchio, PhD, is the Director and Curator of Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno. She also teaches MFA and BFA Seminars as well as Gallery Management and Curatorial Practice. Marji moved to Reno from New York City in 2006 with twelve years of experience as a teacher, artist, curator, and gallery president between Chicago and NYC. Since 1999, she has curated over 40 exhibitions, curated over 250 artists, published 15 scholars, philosophers, writers and poets in 25 catalogs, and has written over 22 catalogs essays.

Dr. Vecchio has degrees from Mount Holyoke College (BA), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA), Bard College (MFA), and European Graduate School (PhD, Magna Cum Laude). In 2009 she was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Columbus State University, Georgia for her 2012 forthcoming book, The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (IB Tauris, London).

The Capital City Arts Initiative’s [CCAI] Books & Writers series invites you to attend a reading and writing workshop Monday, March 5 with Josh Galarza, an award-winning local writer. The free events will take place at the Carson City Library’s Auditorium, 900 N Roop Street, Carson City, Nevada. The writing workshop begins at 4pm followed by the reading at 7pm. The Carson City Library and CCAI co-sponsor the Books & Writers events.

Joe Galarza is a novelist and essayist whose first novel, Corpse, is currently in search of an agent. He is currently working on two other novels: Silence and False Face: The Musical! Galarza was awarded a prestigious Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts from the Nevada Arts Council in 2011.

Galarza is a member of Lone Mountain Writers, a writers’ group based at Western Nevada College, and has shown work in three literary art shows including Always Lost: A Meditation on War, currently touring the United States. Galarza also teaches creative writing at Western Nevada College where he directed Affirmations: A Writer’s Truth, a literary art show that was in WNC’s College Gallery in 2012.

Galarza teaches a primary class at the Minden Montessori School and holds primary and lower-elementary teaching credentials from the North American Montessori Center, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He has also written four curriculum manuals on cultural subjects widely used in Montessori schools. In his free time, he enjoys watching movies and extreme trampoline air drumming, a sport he invented himself.

Nevada Neighbors, the Capital City Arts Initiative’s ongoing series of illustrated public talks, will present artist Lexi Boeger. Her talk, Handspun Revolution: Blurring the Line Between Art and Craft, will take place on Wednesday, February 29 at 7pm at the Carson City Library, 900 N Roop Street, Carson City. There will be an informal reception for Ms. Boeger at 6:15 p.m. preceding her talk. The presentation and reception are free, and the public is cordially invited.

Lexi Boeger learned how to crochet in 2000 but she found that she was much more interested in the yarn itself than the object that she was crocheting. In fact, she noticed that as soon as she began to stitch the yarn, something in it was lost. She bought traditional handspun yarn from the local shop and discovered there was something about it that was just more alive than in commercial yarns. She immediately began learning to spin and to produce hand-spun yarns for her own art production. Ms. Boeger has written several books about spinning including Handspun Revolution and Intertwined.

Ms. Boeger studied at American River College and earned her degree in Fine Art at UC Davis. She gives workshops and lectures in New York, Tokyo, New Zealand, Vancouver, LA, Bristol, and many other cities here and abroad. She has shown her work in the western United States and in Norway and is an originator of the hand-spinning genre often referred to as Art Yarn. She lives with her family in Placerville, California.