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What Up?
exhibition of works by
northern Nevada artists
Nick van Woert
Toni Ortega
Jake Lee-High
Amber Gutry
Jeff Erickson
Erik Burke
Carson City Courthouse Gallery
September 29 - December 15, 2005
CCAI note: The essay below was commissioned in conjunction with the the Capital City Arts Initiative Courthouse Gallery exhibition "What Up?" and a linked special presentation, "What Up? - Artistic & Curatorial Practice in Northern Nevada [a field report]," part of our Nevada Neighbors lecture series.
Our thanks to writer Kris Vagner and to the participating artists of What Up?
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Portraits of the artists as people who grew up at a really interesting point in the history of technology
Essay by Kris Vagner
You could say of almost any artist that nothing is ever finished. Any art exhibit is something of a snapshot, freezing time for a couple months to show where things stand during a particular orphaned moment from a lineage of ideas and techniques that has been evolving for years and will continue to be pushed slowly forward (or, when life in the studio is good, rapidly forward). Production is paused, the most finely tuned pieces from the latest series get shipped to the gallery, and they’re packaged for public consumption with wall text and postcards and red wine and Stilton and strawberries.
But that’s not quite what’s up with What Up?, where six young Northern Nevadans demonstrate that growing up in the information age changes everything. Whether they use digitally based media or good-old welded steel, the basic formula is: lifelong proximity to technology=liberation.
Sure, we all live in the information age, and these 30-and-under artists have the same kind of access to web sites and digital cameras that anyone else does. They can throw those tools in the mental Cuisinart with their cyanotypes and paints, which is infinitely handy in allowing them to get things done fast and get the word out about it even faster. (For example, Eric Burke found a way to email me about five times and keep his blog up-to-date from rural who-knows-where while riding his bike across the country for a film/sociology/workout project.)
If there’s a defining factor for this generation of emerging artists, it’s their hypertextual meta-perspective on the whole idea of the discreet object as a piece of art .
They don’t flat-out reject the concept of the discrete object, as did some of their predecessors making “actions” or “happenings” or using other ephemeral media. Nick van Woert, Toni Ortega, Jake Lee-High, Amber Gutry, Jeff Erickson and Erik Burke can each make a portable, salt-worthy sculpture, painting or photo for a gallery wall when called on to align their methods of production with the conventions of the exhibition process. The notable thing is that they take the snapshot-of-the-career convention a step further. For any of these artists, a piece on the wall isn’t just an excerpted look into a life of artmaking, but an excerpted look into one single hard-to-lasso-with-a-definition project. The actual “piece of art” is less a culmination of a thought process, and more like a souvenir from an evolving series of overlapping bodies of ideas. A single project is likely to be spread across several media, and it often morphs into different combinations of output.
What up, Nick van Woert?
It’s a little like blogging or online dating when he emails from New York City , “I like to keep it digital and impersonal. Usually more thorough.”
No problem. The former Renoite, recently transplanted to NYC for grad school, leaves his trace at fourteensquarefeet.com, where his Flash-polished biography/resume/portfolio/interface with the world is posted.
Smears of leftover fast food in pocket-sized vacuum packs were, for a while, three-dimensional business cards for his metadisciplinary art and design endeavor, The Supermarket.
Van Woert moved a steel frame shaped like a kindergartener’s house all over town and photographed it in places where it might be covered with “cardboard, sod or blankets” for efficiency and coziness.
Official-looking green signs for streets called Heaven and Hell started as outdoor markers, then spent some time as photographs in a gallery.
Van Woert’s projects are part graphic design, part photography, part storyboard, part concept. Then, when they’re finished, their built-in documentary components live on in cyberspace.
What up, Toni Ortega ?
The influence of technology on her work doesn’t manifest itself in the tools she chooses; instead it translates to a fluid approach to materials and processes.
Ortega prefers old-fashioned art forms like bookmaking, papermaking and silk screening. She shuns the removed, hands-off feeling of technologically based art, but her methods are quite current. She brings to her tactile materials an information-aged, tag-team, color-outside-the-lines approach, where processes overlap and projects wander from medium to medium for a while before the outcome makes itself known. Ideas bounce around within the confines of a discipline, stretching its rules in a few different directions at once, maybe pausing to offshoot some tributaries. Shoot a photo, scan the film, make a large negative that looks like a stencil, print it on photo paper. It looks like a paper-cutout. It’s a photograph twice removed. It looks like a photocopy or a lithograph, but that luscious surface only comes from light-sensitive silver and photo chemicals. Later, it might become something else. Depends what the next bend in the road looks like when she gets to it.
What up, Jake Lee-High
He’s en route to a bigger, greener artmaking patsure, but word of exactly which one hasn’t yet hit the presses. Recent reports say he’s stopping off in Scotland on the way back to somewhere domestic and perhaps coastal. A few months ago, art-goers hung out in a 25-minute line at Bleulion Artspace, enjoying treats from the keg, waiting to descend to the basement. For what? No one knew until they got to the bottom of the stairs, where one visitor at a time could take a seat in a classroom full of life-sized plaster Jake Lee-Highs sitting at desks, watching a video projection of their friends upstairs, who were still unaware of the voyeurism they were about to participate in. Sculpture meets surveillance meets sociology meets performance. And then some.
What up, Amber Gutry?
Usually she’s at Never Ender, the boutique and gallery she owns in Reno , stitching together belts out of visquine and hardware-store paint samples, or providing a well-lit, much needed venue for young painters funneling out of the University of Nevada , Reno .
While not holding together the scene, she’s behind the scenes, shooting photos. With an eye for graceful combinations of the industrial and the soft, she looks for small, urban details and ends up with a mix of sparse, graphic boldness and textural abstraction that is as close to tactile as you could get in a two-dimensional medium. They exist just as pixels in files until an outlet comes along, and she takes a flexible approach to the work’s final form. The same images might end up on a quilt or in a frame.
What up, Jeff Erickson?
As a sculptor with a deep appreciation for materials—steel, plastic resin, carved salt, fluorescent bulbs—Erickson’s got the most direct line to the discrete object of anyone in this exhibit, but his process of sorting and processing information and influences has a lot in common with the hypertext approach his peers engage in. An influence from religion or a reference to politics is distilled down into a visceral thing that can be absorbed at the viewer’s choice of a number of depths. Blood from the crucifixion becomes a neat, red target for shooting. It works like a graphic on a street sign, absorbed straight form eye to brain without stopping to become words.
What up, Eric Burke?
Which part is the art? His recent exhibition postcard doubles as an artist’s statement. In the photo, water crackers and brie and a glass of wine are spread out on a gleaming red street curb. The word “gallery,” stenciled in white on the front of the curb, summarizes Burke’s resolution between art and life. The world is his gallery, even though the galley is still, to some extent, his world.
He blurs the divide between action, object and document. He brands fences and walls with the mark, “gallery.” It’s an action/happening/performance, old-school style. He photographs the impromptu “galleries” that say gallery. It’s a document of the action/happening/performance. No, wait, it’s part of the main attraction. He hangs the photos in an actual gallery. Burke defies the power of the institution with one hand and acknowledges its inevitability with the other.
Kris Vagner
Northern Nevada
September 2005
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