Thursday, August 14, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Several grades of Dust

By Gregory Crosby

DUST has been open long enough now to have settled into a comfortable routine of exhibitions, usually featuring two artists, and always timed to coincide with First Friday. The latest, "Dust Covers," breaks this habit with a show featuring works by six artists, some of which come from outside the gallery's roster of representation. It's a group show by a non-group, a smattering of varied artists, and thus drifts peacefully in the air as the gallery's namesake motes.

But the works by Sierra Slentz and Kevin Bays that dominate the main gallery space, though quite different, complement each other. Both painters are obviously talented, and both are pursuing subjects that strike me as somehow slight and only lightly diverting. Slentz presents five 16"x16" squares crammed with layer after layer of flat, abstracted silhouettes, each a differing and spry primary color. On their own, each is a pleasant jewel of color-dictated form and line, but taken together they're like an unruly flower bed you can't quite focus your eyes on, and the effect becomes blotchy and distracted.

Slentz's small works do share some of the energy of the pieces on the opposite wall, Bays' semi-realistic urban settings; settings that juxtapose steel blues and dingy concrete grays with the swirls and baroque calligraphy of spray painted graffiti and tags. Bays' mixing of realistic precision and fantastical graffiti is skillfully done, as if the aesthetics of graffiti were somehow intruding upon Bays' pictorial universe the way the actual tagging treads upon real walls. But there is something depressing and repelling about them, presenting an urban blight that has none of the manic energy of graffiti itself, only its irritating presumption and arrogance. The most successful of these pieces for me is "32575," which shows a tagged railroad car painted upon an actual street sign, the orange and white reflective surface struggling against the meticulously realized tyranny of paint.

Two of Thomas Burke's small geometric landscapes, in vivid day-glo colors, fill out the rest of the main room, both good but decidedly minor compared to Burke's large aluminum canvases currently in the "Airborne" show at UNLV's Donna Beam Gallery. In the side room, Wayne Littlejohn's aquatically flavored wall sculptures are only a disappointment inasmuch as they represent no progression in a style of work now several years old, even though these pieces were apparently made in 2000 (what has Littlejohn been up to since the mid '90s?).

Uncharacteristically, the two most memorable pieces in the show are those most outside the aesthetic DUST has championed: a single abstract oil painting by Yoko Konopik, and an earthenware sculpture by Rebekah Bogard. I've seen a few works by Konopik over the years, small paintings that hovered somewhere between Paul Klee and minimalism, but "Unfolding I," a larger, strongly affecting abstraction in red and off-yellow, is quite good. It's an austere but undulating diptych of rounded shapes and curving lines, perfectly symmetrical in its asymmetry. It feels like a throwback, true enough, but it's the sort of throwback that reminds you of why abstraction matters.

The revelation, however, is Bogard's work, "Media Nox." Here at last Bogard has left behind the candy-colored pastels that gave her phantasmagorical, insect-like creatures a too cartoony style that looked more derivative than definitive. "Media Nox" is still a strange, alien organism, but rendered in silver gray, with four vast wings sprouting from a smooth, clam-like mouth, each wing as beautiful and sinister as you might find on a pigeon from hell. An artist at the opening said it looked to him like the "Winged Victory of Samothrace" from another planet, and I agreed (after arching an eyebrow in what I imagined was the way James Whistler would have and saying, "I wish I had said that."). "Media Nox" possibly represents an ambitious progression in Bogard's work, one I hope she pursues further.