Thursday, February 06, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: New gallery hopes to create 'Dust' collectors

By Gregory Crosby

If there's a single word that recurs in owner Naomi Arin's description of what sort of work the new gallery Dust is going to show, it's "sexy." Flipping through some slides of pieces by Angela Kallus and Bradley Corman, her enthusiasm for the art is what you would hope to find in an art dealer: passionate, smart and, well, sexy.

"This piece is so sexy," she declares, holding a slide up to the light as her partner in the gallery, painter Jerry Misko II, nods in agreement. It might be comic, if not for the fact that the artists Arin and Misko intend to champion to collectors here and abroad are, indeed, a damned sexy group: sexy in the sense of excitement, sensuousness and the pure pleasure principle inherent in visual art, which in the last decade has slowly made its way out of a long purgatory of pious conceptualism.

The unanswered question is whether this sort of "sex" will sell. Las Vegas has unloaded the more obvious kind for decades, but the track record for commercial galleries trading in contemporary art that rises above mere décor is spotty, two recent attempts being the dabbling Lisa Livingston Gallery and the more ambitious Smallworks Gallery, which once occupied space in the Arts Factory just upstairs from Dust's new digs.

"I think part of the problem for Smallworks was that they tried to do things from the outside in," says Misko, referring to Smallworks' roster of prominent artists from outside Las Vegas. "We're attempting to do things from the inside out."

Dust, which opens Feb. 7 with its inaugural group show Collecting Dust, will be perhaps the first local gallery to focus not just on artists who live and work in Vegas, but on Vegas artists who have gained a modicum of success in the wider art world and need a strong promoter to reflect that success in Southern Nevada.

Dust's mission is twofold, according to Arin: "Our role as gallerists is not just to create a place in Vegas to see contemporary art, but to represent the strain of Vegas contemporary art to a national audience." Arin and Misko embrace the idea of a gallery as not simply a place to sell art but to be active in the gallery's traditional role as an educator and tastemaker. "We want to create a whole new class of collectors," says Arin. "Communicating just what is so important about these artists to a wider public is the whole reason we exist."

"And we want to sell some paintings," Misko says with a smile.

"Exactly," says Arin. "We want these artists, many of whom have already shown at galleries around the country, to succeed both locally and nationally. We want curators to come see their work, we want to get them into group shows, we want local collectors to buy them."

Certainly, in Arin and Misko, the loose group of Las Vegas artists that has coalesced in the last few years has two ardent and deft advocates. Arin, a local attorney, was for many years a grant writer for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Misko, in addition to being a quintessentially Vegas painter, is just now winding up a long presidency of the nonprofit Contemporary Arts Collective. Their roster of artists--Mark Brandvik, Cara Cole, Keith Conley, Bradley Corman, Curtis Fairman, James Hough, Sean Hummel, Carrie Jenkins, Angela Kallus, Sean Slattery and Mike Thistle--is a diverse and distinctive selection of Vegas artists that, while highly individualistic, do share the sensibility of visual and textural pleasure that forms the new Vegas aesthetic in contemporary art (Dust itself takes its name from the famed lettering style of the Stardust sign).

Whether Dust can succeed in the face of local apathy and occasionally national hostility is a job for naysayers and cheerleaders. Their commitment to the venture, along with their discriminating advocacy and high spirits, will in any case likely make Dust the sort of gallery where "cutting edge" is redeemed from cliché. "It's a matter of staying power and quality of work," says Misko. With its stellar combination of artists, management and space, Dust just might settle in for good.