Art that’s all around you

Kristen Peterson, Las Vegas Sun

Friday, Aug. 3, 2007 | 7:30 a.m.

You can't argue the visibility. Thousands traipse the Clark County Government Center's rotunda each week.

But the rotunda's rotating art exhibits can sometimes clash with the high-gloss granite floors in the busy cylindrical intersection.

Have security add bright orange safety cones to the four edges of a somewhat minimalist installation and, well, you quite possibly have a completely different message than intended.

Essentially, the space is as great as it is bad.

RC Wonderly III has no complaints. He's more fascinated by the way his work communicates with the meandering general public.

Some quizzically study it. Others stop to discuss it. Others stroll obliviously across it. (Later, security will rope off the sculptures.)

It's a common response to Wonderly's work. Either you see it or you don't. It's something or it isn't.

The large-scale pieces, made of floor tile, evolved from small works made from paper in which the artist cut out a shape and folded it over to form a cube. The pattern removed from the base is the pattern of the cube.

It's a concept that won him first place at last year's juried Art Roundup exhibit at the Las Vegas Art Museum. The piece, "Untitled (stack)," a 3-by-5-by-1-inch minimalist sculpture made from a stack of 100 index cards, featured a tiny cube on a vast plane that resembled a landscape.

Its "duality" attracted the juror, art historian Jeffrey Ryan, who described the piece as "a huge landscape with dramatic shadow" that is "the tiniest, most humble thing."

"It looks like this big, existential plane," Ryan said. "It's sparse, simple, but it took a lot of thought."

The planes of the large works at the government center aren't as spacious as his small piece, but the play between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional is still apparent and the work is equally fun. The paper has been replaced with 3/4-inch wood tile on one piece and vinyl tiles on the other two. The cubes are the height of a typical chair. It's minimal, mathematical, philosophical and easy on the eyes.

For Wonderly, whose artist 's reception is this evening, the process is almost more important than the product.

His explanation of that process resembles geometric word problems. Wonderly says it's mostly trial and error. He begins by drawing one line, then calculates angles.

The Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate of the University of Dayton in Ohio started out a business major, moved into visual communication design, then to furniture design and then to sculpture. From there he switched to print making and ended up in painting.

A fan of minimalism and early modernism, he began with monochromatic paintings of cubes.

Though the high-gloss floors, reflecting light, shapes and shadows make it less than ideal for viewing the work, the rotunda isn't all that bad because you could put Wonderly's work anywhere and people would likely be engaged.