Art: Paint Draw

Variety show

By Erika Yowell

Downtown's Dust Gallery recently acquired more urbane, overtly gallery-style digs at 1221 S. Main St., just down the way from its old Arts Factory haunt on Charleston. Now with an easily accessible storefront location and one large front gallery to show off headlining shows, Dust has quickly cemented its already widely held reputation as the best thing going in town.

Its current show, Paint Draw, comprises pieces by 12 different artists working in a healthy variety of styles. If you like decorative, there's some of that; if narrative or conceptual is more your bag, they have that, too. Gallery partners Naomi Arin and Jerry Misko are obviously confident enough in their aesthetic judgment to select work that defies classification in one stylistic genre. In doing so, they've extended beyond the Las Vegas realm that marked the gallery's original scope to include artists from New York, Los Angeles and even Austria. Paint Draw makes one of the most notable efforts in some time to bring established out-of-town artists to Las Vegas, which only further solidifies Dust's place at the apex of the local art scene.

Bookending the exhibit are two monumental graphite-on-paper drawings by L.A. artist Patrick Nickell. Using ample line variation to render a tangle of barbed-wiry vines in "Swan Song," Nickell succeeds in creating a certain depth that calls to mind embossing. Next to him is a swirly acrylic painting on panel by New York City artist Peggy Bates. Her liquid "Giglo Beach," with its Florentine juxtaposition of raspberry and orange sherbet colors, looks less like a waterfront scene and more like a steroid-enriched version of the decorative papers sold in stationery shops and outdoor markets throughout Italy.

Interestingly, given the Vegas scene's recent history, some of the local artists in this show demonstrate a more narrative than decorative bent. Angela Kallus and Jerry Misko have admittedly decorative entries here in "Slouch" (a curvy impasto number done in fiery colors against black) and "Vulcan" (a sizzling, abstracted blow-up view of neon signage), respectively. However, Carrie Jenkins' and Mark Brandvik's paintings introduce human subjects and recognizable edifices into their work. In Jenkins' work "Not Again," a stylish moppet in a micro-miniskirt confronts a gust of wind (I hate it when that happens); she stands against a background studded with white squares (snow? hail?) that activate the scene brilliantly. Meanwhile, Brandvik is still getting mileage out of his oft-displayed, proven crowd-pleaser "El Morocco," which confers upon the namesake Midcentury Modern motel on Las Vegas Boulevard a kind of dignity it hasn't seen in years.