Exhibit will test your taste in art

Friday, July 13, 2007 | 7:24 a.m.

Playful and nostalgic, Marty Walsh has portrayed members of her family via paintings of vintage kitchen appliances. Her portraits of plastic cowboy and Indian dolls evoke memories of childhood and her cake series is lavish and otherworldly.

Walsh is again asking you to look into your past with her most recent works, a crackers series on exhibit at Trifecta Gallery. But this time she does so in an unsettling and intriguing way. She plays with your senses.

An artist who says she's always "tasted" color, Walsh revisits the flavors of her youth by painting portraits of crackers in grape, lime, wild cherry and watermelon.

By choosing crackers, which are familiar to viewers and salty enough to contrast fruity flavors, she has made the flavor stand out much more effectively than had she painted candy .

The cracker "cross-references your senses and messes with your synapses in your brain. They're a simple vehicle for the taste of color," she says.

Walsh started painting traditional cracker s in December when preparing for the Minumental Invitational, an exhibit by Las Vegas artists selected to create small works of art that could sell for about $100.

Walsh went square. In addition to crackers, she painted Scrabble pieces. Her crackers were a hit and sold out in the first 10 minutes of the show.

"It's anonymous, yet a cracker has a powerful charge to it," s he says. "People remember them from when they were a child."

Nearly all of her 12-by-12-inch flavored crackers sold in the first two days of the latest show, "Chasing Color," and Walsh doesn't plan to continue them. Anyone who wants to experience her blueberry or root beer crackers need s to visit the gallery at the Arts Factory by the end of the month. Walsh says, however, that she's thinking of a similar theme, but with animal crackers.

Details: Noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, noon to 2 p.m. Saturday, through July 28; Trifecta Gallery in the Arts Factory, 103 E. Charleston Blvd.; 366-7001 or trifectagallery.com

Nod to NICA

Anyone flipping through the catalog for UNLV's master's of fine arts candidate exhibitions for 2007 might have noticed the throwback to the early days of contemporary art in Las Vegas.

The NICA logo, featured at the bottom of the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery's introduction, is preceded by heartfelt gratitude from gallery Director Jerry Schefcik : "I wish to thank those of Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art who made this publication possible. NICA may be gone, but its influence is certainly not forgotten."

Schefcik was curator for the nonprofit arts group that had hoped to establish a contemporary art museum in Las Vegas and had enough connected board members, including Roger Thomas, to draw interesting exhibits. But there wasn't enough financial support for the group, and it closed its gallery doors in 2000. Several of its former board members have joined the board of the Las Vegas Art Museum, which now has a contemporary mission.

Schefcik says money left from NICA's dissolution had been held by former directors who approached him two years ago and asked whether the money could be used by the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. Half of the $5,000 was used to publish last year's graduate student catalog , the other half for this year's graduate catalog.

Details: The opening reception for the current exhibit, "Four Easy Pieces," a video and photo exhibit of Las Vegas that examines the harsh climate, natural resources, urban living and over stimulation via the American dream, is at 7 tonight. Admission is free, 895-3893 or donnabeamgallery.unlv.edu