Thursday, Aug. 17, 2006 | 7:35 a.m.
What: 55th Art Roundup Juried Exhibition
Where: Las Vegas Art Museum, 9600 W. Sahara Ave.
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday
Through: Aug. 31
Admission: $6 general, $5 seniors, $3 students, free for children under 12
More info: 360-8000 , www.lasvegasartmuseum.org
If there are any doubts the Las Vegas Art Museum has taken a new direction, you might want to check out its simplest of exhibits: the museum's 55th Art Roundup Juried Exhibition.
Yes, there were shows - "Southern California Minimalism" and "Adventures in a Temperate Climate: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Martin Mull" - this year that helped carve the institution's new identity as a contemporary art museum.
The juried exhibit, on display through the end of August, also taps into something different: a more diverse group of local artists. Although it didn't go out of its way to seek contemporary art, it seems the museum's new direction shook out a lot of cutting-edge artists.
Libby Lumpkin, consulting executive director, says she noticed immediately that the art was all over the place: "It seemed that more adventuresome artists entered. There were a great many more experimental pieces."
More than 250 artists submitted work: graduate students, Sunday painters, professional artists, seniors and amateurs embarking on their first efforts. Of the more than 1,000 submissions, 154 are featured in the show that is displayed according to color, texture and subject matter. This is the first year digital submissions were accepted, and two were entered, Damien Gilley's seven-minute "Drifting" and Derek Sola's two-minute montage, "Graffiti Essay No. 1."
All of this provided fodder for the show's lone juror: Jeffrey Ryan. Ryan, an art historian, has worked on exhibits at Museum of Modern Art in New York and is curator at Visual Resource Center at California State University, Long Beach, where Lumpkin last worked. Ryan says he wasn't looking for more contemporary work, but selectrf winners whose work was more progressive.
"A lot of the choices made were works using very traditional methods with the results being nontraditional," Ryan says.
Works on paper
Anyone who saw Danielle Kelly's sculpture at Trifecta Gallery earlier this year will understand how the UNLV graduate student transfers from three-dimensional works to paper. Her graphite on paper, "Motivator (Who Loves Ya Baby)," is a detailed and seemingly mathematic composition of line, space and texture. Its continuity is mesmerizing.
Selected because: "It's the simplest tools: paper and pencil. She made the most fantastic work out of it. I love the simplicity of materials, but the effects were dazzling. It's intimate yet holds its own on the wall." Ryan said the work was abstract, modern and very humble, and tells the viewers: "Here's another way of doing things."
Watercolor
Patricia L. Caspara's "Snow in Las Vegas, NV," a slightly abstract, slightly representational piece, captures snow-covered fronds in the foreground and a soft, detailed image of a Joshua tree in the background.
Selected because: "It was as exquisite as any watercolor I had seen in a long time. It reminded me of a Winslow Homer. Watercolors are very hard to do, but it was just beautiful and just sung. She used the white of the paper very strongly. I knew that it was created by someone who knew how to make watercolors."
Painting
Erin Stellmon's "Chutes and Ladders 3," a digital print iron-on collage on stretched fabric isn't exactly a painting, but falls into the category in the way a Rauschenberg would, Ryan says. It's small (12 inches by 24 inches) and is anchored at the bottom by images of multiunit mailboxes and garbage bins, a sight familiar to anyone who lives in an apartment. A sea foam green-colored cinder-block wall and matching house neighbors a trailer home behind a chain-link fence and a mound of construction dirt and debris.
Selected because: "She pushed the boundaries of what a painting can be. The photographs were treated in a painterly fashion. After seeing a whole bunch of landscapes, it's really hard to surprise someone, then this came along. It's like a landscape, but not any landscape you've ever seen It reminded me of wayward spaces that no one bothers looking at. It was just so pretty and so sumptuous and on such a small scale."
Photography
Atsuko Parker's "Dawn Shines With Her Rose-Red Fingers in Las Vegas" is an 18-by-12-inch photograph of a contemporary mountain landscape that radiates a cone of twinkling lights.
Selected because: "There is plenty of desert imagery," Ryan says, "but I always try to err on the side of what else you can show me? Her taking the most ubiquitous lights of Las Vegas and putting them on this sunset was magical. She went to the next level, yet she used a very traditional means of photography."
Sculpture
R.C. Wonderly III's "Untitled (Stack)" was created using a stack of 100 index cards, tape and acrylic. The 3-by-5-by-1-inch minimalist piece has a cross-shape cut halfway into the stack and topped with a tiny, simple boxlike structure.
Selected because: "I was grabbed by the duality. There is this huge landscape with dramatic shadow, but it's the tiniest most humble thing. It looks like this big, existential plane. It's sparse, simple, but it took a lot of thought."
Best in show
The Wally Goodman and Patrick Duffy Best in Show award was given to Chad Brown's "Visit," a large-scale, slightly abstract pink-hued landscape based on Robert Smithson's earthwork "Spiral Jetty."
Selected because: "It's one of the few works that speaks to every audience. It succeeds on a populist level and to an art world 'sophisticate.' It's still very accessible even though it's slightly abstract. There's some ambition to it in the scale and subject matter, and yet it's very beautiful. I wanted to show people that there was another way of revisiting the landscape genre."
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