Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Artist takes a ‘Chance’ on meaning of Vegas

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, May 1, 1998 | 10:17 a.m.

ARTISTS THESE days approach Las Vegas with plenty of optic nerve: Work produced in and about the city tends toward an identifiable Vegasthetic -- flashy, campy, speckled with ironic Sin City iconography. If you doubt it, check the next group exhibit of local artists. Elvis still hasn't left the gallery.

A pair of giant dice hangs from the ceiling of SITE Las Vegas, Mark Masuoka's wee alterna-space on the bottom floor of the Arts Factory. But otherwise, for this show of his sculpture (remarkably, his first solo exhibit in his decade here, opening tonight), he's rounded up none of the usual suspects. No Rat Pack, no neon, no poker hands, no razzmatazz; these pieces are awfully quiet for Vegas. Even his big dice fall short of being pure Vegas -- they're not fuzzy! (That's partly artistic intention, partly the high cost of fur.) Nonetheless, the show, "Chance," arises from living in and thinking deeply about this place.

Yeah, I know, the title makes that clear. "Chance" ... Vegas -- duh! But keep looking. The show is really about the levels of risk underlying the obvious: The uncertainty of living in a town that unthinkingly embraces the hyper-consumption of the American dream; the risk of creating art.

"Chance" finds Masuoka deeply conflicted about his adopted town (he hails from Hawaii). Ambiguity drenches two linked pieces, "Houses" and "Hotel." "Houses" is a row of four simple green boxes with roofs -- large replicas of Monopoly houses, a whimsical embodiment of Vegas' home-building bender. The boxes protrude from the wall, floating. "It takes away the foundation," Masuoka says, "which is what a house is all about."

The row of unsteady homes leads inexorably to a pointed red box -- "Hotel," of course. Only it's dangling in space at a skewed angle, even less firm than the houses. Those five simple shapes contain all the reasonable questions many of us have about boomtown Las Vegas. "It addresses the misconception that more is better, that bigger is better."

Perhaps his most personal piece is "Yellow Man." A yellow figure, bound in rope, perches at the long end of a horizontally suspended cross. Chose your allusion: Is he bouncing on a diving board or walking the plank? About to leap from religion or holding unsteadily to it? "It's about faith, what you believe, about being a Christian, about being an artist, being on edge ..."

In this stuff, the risks of chance aren't as explicitly dire as they are, say, in some of local artist Robert Beckmann's apocalyptic canvases, in which atomic clouds billow above triple sevens. "Chance's" dramas are smaller, more personal, deeply ambiguous about the real meaning of Vegas: "Is a bigger house a better house?" he wonders. "Is a better car really a better car?" Las Vegas is perhaps the ultimate setting in which to ponder what you need vs. what you want. These are not inconsequential questions -- Masuoka, like a lot of people in this famously transient town, still hasn't decided how long he'll stick around.

Contemporary art doesn't communicate in narrative; it's associative, pulling in ideas and impressions like a magnet. Somewhere in that jostle and friction it says its piece, and in the ambiguity of his floating houses and hovering crosses, Masuoka says more about living in Las Vegas than a dozen hip recontextualizations of Elvis, leaving little for me to add except, of course, Thankya very mush ...