Art: 11 Women, 2 Men and a Baby's Hand by Tom Umholtz

Pieces of me

By Erika Yowell

In the Nevada Arts Council's Southern Nevada office sits the most unassuming gallery space in town. OXS--short for Office eXhibition Series--is in an aging suite of offices on Seventh Street, just north of Charleston Boulevard. It's modest to the point of absurdity, in that it took three different visits last week during purported business hours to find the gallery actually unlocked and staffed.

If you're lucky enough to gain entrance to OXS, which is advertised as open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. until noon and 1 p.m. until 5 p.m., you will have the pleasure of viewing the work of one of the Arts Council's recognized artists. A total of 12 artists are on view between the council's Carson City and Las Vegas outposts for the 2004-2005 year, with each artist exhibiting in either city for one two-month period. All exhibitors are recipients of awards through the council's various programs.

Until Nov. 30, the Las Vegas artist on view is Tom Umholtz, a local painter and muralist with experience in scenery painting for Broadway productions, television and film. His show is titled 11 Women, 2 Men and a Baby's Hand, although one of the titular women and one man are absent, as Umholtz generously donated the painting containing them to the Contemporary Arts Collective's recent art auction.

Umholtz works in oil on canvas, and acknowledges in his artist statement that his paintings are often deemed "mysterious and unknowable," a quality he attributes to the fact that he finds his characteristic female subjects similarly inaccessible. His paintings are each derived from photo composites he assembles, and therefore have a distinctly pastiche quality.

Some of his figures, most notably "Eastern Woman" and "College Girl," are missing great chunks of their bodies, allowing a glimpse of the paintings' backgrounds through their forms. In the former, a woman dressed in what looks to be Pakistani or Indian garb has a gaping hole in her middle where the baby she is obviously cradling has been excised from the image. "College Girl's" armful of books is missing, as is part of her head, freeing more surface area for the vaguely Cubist pattern in which Umholtz has conceived the background. In "Black Woman," the figure's body itself dissembles into Cubist-inspired fragments, while a transfixed male figure--perhaps the artist himself?--watches the phenomenon unfold.