Thursday, July 31, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Something in the air

By Gregory Crosby

Over the last decade, the master of fine arts program at UNLV has turned out a disparate yet aesthetically united cadre of talented artists, the legacy of which is on fine display in UNLV's Donna Beam Art Gallery. Airborne, on view through Aug. 16, takes as its theme new works whose creation involves spray guns rather than brushes, but the show also serves as an alumni gathering of some of the university's budding art stars.

The emphasis, as it has been for half a decade, is on sensuous yet disciplined abstraction. With the exception of Sush Machida Gaikotsu, the figurative is nowhere to be found, and even Sush's elaborately imagined and idiosyncratic cartoon universe strikes a balance between the recognizable and the products of pure graphic design. Sush's two pieces, "Holly 0 7" and "CoCo C Surf Love," are anchored by his signature fish, aquatic beasts so large they fill the canvas until it seems every other element, from sci-fi, anime owls to packs of Marlboro cigarettes stripped of their logos, is merely orbiting these mysterious and arch Leviathans. Looking at Sush's work is like a window on the parallel cartoon universe that Japan has so successfully exported into popular consciousness, the single Asian aesthetic virus that remains impervious to the imperial American pop culture. The significance, even meaning, of the figurative elements is secondary to the playful way in which they interact with each other and their strange, tooned-in context.

Elsewhere, color in the service of geometry rules the day. Tim Bavington continues to expand his technique and subject with "Little by Little," a massive canvas rippling with his multicolored vertical stripes of shimmering neon, packed so tightly that they literally vibrate as the eye tries to focus on them. This effect is entirely intentional, as Bavington bases the pattern on chord structures in music, re-creating the spectrum of visible light as one elaborate guitar solo.

Thomas Burke's pieces touch upon music as well with their pop song titles, "Tainted Love" and "I Want You to Want Me," but Burke engages in a different sort of optical play. His morphing, twisting blocks of geometric color fields are painted in such a way as to buckle and swell, tricking the eye into thinking a one-dimensional canvas is rippling off the gallery wall like a banner in the wind. Burke's subject calls to mind what a game of Tetris might be like if you were playing it just as some fine Owsley-grade LSD was hitting your bloodstream. Hackneyed as the word is, "psychedelic" is the best word for Burke's painting, albeit a computerized, 21st century psychedelia.

David Ryan's abstracted reliefs in wood and acrylic look almost serene between Bavington and Burke's canvases, ice cubes of minimalism floating in a heady chromatic cocktail. The serene and chromatic are united, however, in a new work by Yek, "Hoax (The Full Horror Redux)." Yek's paintings, their outer edges and corners gently buckling up and outward as if a new center of gravity was softly tugging their centers through the wall, have in the past employed the same harsh, neon palette as Burke and Bavington. Here, Yek trades these in for discomforting pastels, a sinister blue and peach at the top of the canvas, as if a misty dimension was being revealed by the convex folding of visual space. But the rest of the canvas is a field of bony, off-white, the same as the gallery wall. The effect is marvelous, as if the wall of the gallery itself was buckling under the pressure from the hidden universe on the other side.

Airborne is a strong show, at once a smattering of style and intent that still hangs together on the thread of a certain Las Vegas aesthetic: hot colors, seductive manipulation of design elements, the frolic of elements from mass visual media. As an advertisement for the talent that has passed through UNLV, it couldn't be more enticing.