Thursday, May 08, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: True to their school

By Gregory Crosby

A walk around the Las Vegas Academy student art exhibit Fun Shui (now on view at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery through May 25) is both enjoyable and envy-inducing. Why wasn't there an arts academy when I was in high school? The thought of spending four years surrounded by like-minded creatives instead of navigating the dispiriting social hierarchies that made high school such a terror makes me wish time travel was a viable option. Still, the viewer can vicariously enjoy the energy young minds and hands engaged in artistic production can produce in this show, which is a survey of basic techniques and media organized around, according to a rather overly mystical-sounding statement, "an aesthetic experience that is strong in yin and yang energy" (hence the exhibit's title).

The kind of energy the show is strongest in isn't harmony as much as it is untrammeled identity in the making. Since these are teenagers, the subject matter in the work is for the most part themselves and their friends: portraits and self-portraits abound, even when the figure is incidental (as in most of the photography). But the self-dramatization typical of adolescence is entirely forgivable here, given the level of talent and engagement on the part of these students. The oil portraits along one wall are a yearbook of brushwork style and casual fascination: You feel as if you know all these kids or would like to. Kathryn Calley's "Untitled," Choi NaEun's "Untitled," Avi Alvarez's "Defenseless," Dima Duchet's "Looking Down on You," Erica Kahr's "Big Head!," Samantha Steelman's "Me, Myself and Green" and Rostislav Dzhurinzky's "Self-portrait" present a gallery of poses and moods, dramatic or direct, open or enigmatic, that taken as a whole draw the viewer into the curious, half-forming place that made being a teenager such an exciting and delirious work in progress.

The show is dominated by these portrait studies, though a few pieces on other subjects find their way in, most of these because of their demonstration of a mastery of a particular technique: Christine Han's surreal gouache "Limefish," Gary Mar's scratchy intaglio print "Home," Crystal A. Lucero's vividly orange and blue linoleum print "Like Water, Like Wine." Shadows and their composition inform a series of black-and-white oils, such as Holly Vaughn's cinematic "No Rubber Duckie," a cowboy with a gun asleep in a bathtub. There's even the expected touch of Goth, especially in ceramics and assemblages: Vivian Martin's "Frankenstein," Charles Calixto's "The Alchemist's Riddle," (a shrunken head inside a glass case decorated with symbols), Patty Beltran's sexy teapot "Corset."

If there's no single standout among these students--they all seem evenly matched at this point in their skills--the collective impression is nonetheless highly favorable. The greatest fun in this show is simply to immerse oneself in the possibilities and explorations of art school when the students are still too young to be thinking about careerism or art ideologies (sadly, there's plenty of time for that soon enough). If you visit the show and leave without at least a wistful half-wish to jump in a time machine yourself, you have, alas, grown up.

Stay `unknowable,' please

Meanwhile, over at the city's other gallery, Barbara Barnes Allen's portentously titled show Looking for Some Sense of the Unknowable, now on view at the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery through June 1, is as grown up and lifeless as can be. Allen's "artist books" and icons, assemblages made from Renaissance bric-a-brac, aim at being mysterious and marvelous, and fall greatly short. Allen ransacks all the cliches of Western art, framing her collages in chopped up gilt frames, tacking on fleur de lys, adorning them with neoclassical pineapples and faded fripperies. The results are so attenuated that they would not be out of place in a mainstream decorator's catalog, something to add a little color to a room. There's more to assemblage at this point than gluing together buttons and bobs with a scrap of 15th century satin and thinking the elements arranged thus will do all the work. If these works are any indication, truly mysterious and magical objects will remain unknowable to the artist for some time.