“The Ballad of Mr. Hands and Other Yarns” is on display at Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. The exhibit features the comic-inspired mixed media works of Evan Dent. Dent’s images are mutations of the seemingly innocent — but violent, sexist and racist — world of early 20th century cartoon characters.
Monday, March 3, 2008 | 2 a.m.
Danielle Kelly’s “Grand Army of the Republic Highway” is on display at Winchester Cultural Center Gallery in Las Vegas.
Down a dark highway
Danielle Kelly’s “Grand Army of the Republic Highway” takes a philosophical plunge into the ghosts that haunt our personal and collective American psyches.
It’s shadowy and angular, dark and discomforting. Constructed from cardboard boxes that are stained with histories of their own, the installation has multiple dimensions.
The installation at Winchester Community Center is the product of a trip Kelly made a few months ago to an artists workshop in Vermont. She walked a segment of U.S. 6, the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, each day for 19 days in the state’s darkest county — known for its lack of sunshine — during the darkest month of the year.
That highway is part of the transcontinental highway named for the organization of veteran Civil War Union Soldiers. In Vermont, grocery stores, candies and monuments commemorate the soldiers. American history was everywhere and presidential campaigning was in full swing.
Consumed with the idea of histories, personal and collective, Kelly drove back to Las Vegas with the shifting landscape and violence of American history in her thoughts.
She conceived the project as a way to sort through our country’s dark past and its role in current culture and politics. But she extended it to include confrontations with our own “inherited” and experienced histories.
“We keep passing these things around,” Kelly says. “Things in front of us that we can’t see but we all carry with us. I thought, ‘If I see them they won’t be as scary.’ ”
The composed crudeness of the installation, which includes rectangular cardboard columns jutting from particle-board platforms, is a change from Kelly’s more minimalist and refined drawings and sculptures seen in other shows, including “inter,” a trapezoidal minimalist sculpture made from mirrored Plexiglas, medium-density fiberboard, Bondo and acrylic paint. The piece, exhibited last year at the Las Vegas Art Museum’s “Art Roundup (where it won first place in sculpture), was inspired by the idea of making a form that could disappear. Its dimensions flattened depending on the viewer’s vantage point.
The shapes and repetition in “Grand Army of the Republic Highway” resemble elements in Kelly’s drawings. But this is narrative, a story of stories that lurk in the shadows — a noirish product of modernist forms that Kelly uses to materialize “the ghosts we all live with.”
Details: “Grand Army of the Republic Highway,” through April 11, Winchester Cultural Center Gallery, 3130 S. McLeod Drive, 455-7340.
A great yarn
There is no doubt that Evan Dent’s “The Ballad of Mr. Hands and Other Yarns” is at first friendly and inviting. Like any element of pop culture, the exhibit of cartoons seems like a fun and easy read. But Dent doesn’t fool us for long. Vulgarities, violence and other dark social and cultural issues play out among the clubbed, bruised, eyeless cartoon characters representative of stories and ideas Dent collected from mass media.
Dent’s exhibit, “The Ballad of Mr. Hands and Other Yarns,” is partly inspired by a 45-year-old Washington man who died of internal injuries after a sexual encounter with a horse.
The vintage-looking mixed media works on paper, board and canvas are grainy, smudged and illustrative. Influenced by early 20th century cartoons riddled with racism and violence, Dent’s works in this exhibit deal with contemporary exploits, such as “Mr. Hands,” a 45-year-old Washington man, who died of internal injuries after a sexual encounter with a horse. A video tape of one of his encounters made the Internet circuit. The incident and video became playful fodder for videos on youtube.com.
Dent, who says the incident “changed him,” created a cartoon image of the story as a way to handle the situation by making it less brutal and offensive. “It’s all real personal for me. I just wanted to purge that.”
Cartoon stills in each deal with violence in the same way some of our favorite cartoons did, often in mid-action: an animal cartoon butcher looking miffed after his ax-wielding tail chopped off his thumb and three fingers, Popeye and Olive Oyl emerging from a sooty chimney and images of pummeled characters lying flat with crossed out eyes.
Dent, whose work tends to be darker, says he originally painted portraiture, but found that cartoons could be more expressive.
Details: “The Ballad of Mr. Hands and Other Yarns,” through Thursday, UNLV’s Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, 895-3893
Story of thirst
Fifty panels by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti explore the concept of thirst, broadly defined.
Las Vegas gave a warm welcome last week to cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, whose graphic narrative on thirst at Las Vegas’ Aerial Gallery was dedicated Thursday. Each panel of the 50-panel cartoon was printed on a vinyl banner that was installed above the sidewalks of Las Vegas Boulevard, creating a cyclical story that explores different types of thirst — knowledge, exercise, employment, health or the basic need to quench one’s palate.
The Chicago cartoonist and illustrator was selected last year for the public art project by the Las Vegas Arts Commission.
Brunetti is a favorite among adult comics. He burst onto the scene with grim and sometimes violent cartoons dealing with depression and sexuality, a therapeutic cleansing that included narratives on James Thurber and Soren Kierkegaard. In addition to editing “An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories” (2006), Brunetti has designed a couple of covers for The New Yorker magazine.
“Thirst” is a fun story about our social and environmental ecosystem told in vintage-looking gold and red cartoon panels.
Details: “Thirst,” through February, Las Vegas Boulevard from Charleston Boulevard to Stewart Avenue, 229-6844 or www.lvartscommission.com
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