Dennis Hollingsworth

Near Dark, Reviewed.

Jaret Keene reviews Near Dark for Las Vegas' City Life:

Art Reviews

Darkness on the edge of town

Exhibit draws inspiration from B-grade horror film

by JARRET KEENE

IT'S NOT EVERY CONTEMPORARY ART SHOW that aligns itself with some obscure, white-trash, weird-Western vampire flick from the '80s. Curated by British artist Neal Rock, Near Dark pays homage to the Kathryn Bigelow-directed movie of the same name, bringing to light the eerier works of Los Angeles and Las Vegas artists. Although this exhibit bears no obvious "Gothic Western" imagery, there is a shared atmosphere of cross-genre playfulness and moody textures, making UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery a crepuscular place to stop and ponder the dusty margins of popular culture, the boredom of suburban existence, the fragmentation of self in a media-saturated era. You know, the heavy stuff.

Speaking of heavy, Neal Rock's giant silicon installations look solid enough to cause the gallery's walls to shudder. Two works from his Faith Culture series are on display here, looking like giant melted candles from some epic Catholic mass. Gouged in certain spots, these funnel-cake candelabras sometimes boast hideous wounds. Upon second glance, however, they're just waxy holes again, in the same way a B-movie protagonist suddenly sees fangs in her beloved's smile.

Pearl C. Hsiung's "Guanocano," meanwhile, erupts with enameled color, its luscious lava spurting rather sexually from purple volcano lips draped with a pearl necklace. "Oculus Sinister" is another vagina dentata, albeit one that stares at the viewer with ominous intent. Is this uncanny eyeball attempting to read your mind or take it over? Hard to tell.

Caroline Castano chooses to explore the notion of gender as a fluid construct rather than dwell on apocalyptic imagery. Her mixed-media efforts, "Silence of the Sirens" and "Hair Boys," reinforce the exhibit's mission to illuminate works "stuck in the middle of somewhere, trying to figure it out." Castano's beautiful boy faces adorned by elegant, overflowing hairstyles gain a shadowy edge thanks to their juxtaposition against the aforementioned "Oculus Sinister," as well as the Day for Night series, courtesy of British artist Peter Lamb. Lamb's collages of figures besieged by the pop-culture detritus of everything from Hannibal Lecter's mask to anatomy skeletons are unsettling to stand in front of, and nearly impossible to read. Are they meant to be scary? Suggestive? Whatever the intention, these pieces border on the primitivist.

For this critic, however, it's the PVC and polypropylene work of Stephen Hendee, a UNLV art prof, that resonates the most with the exhibit's idea of spectral liminality. Artificial terrains like "I'm always crashing the same car" and "Days of Quaaludes and wine" are mounted on the gallery wall like paintings, but instead look like desolate video game landscapes generated by an Atari 2600, ripped from the TV screen and crucified for our pleasure. Like Cara Cole (another Las Vegas-based artist of extreme realms), Hendee makes his apocalyptic gestures look easy. He's better known for larger installations that speak to the increasing presence of the digital in our everyday lives, but with just these three small-scale works, Hendee has me hooked on the idea that even a wasteland offers glimpses of odd beauty.

Upstairs, Gordon Cheung's Top 10 Billionaire series sits like a box of chocolates. These spray-painted portraits of folks like Bill Gates are overlayed against something akin to stock-market listings. Cheung's offerings are perhaps the most "pop" of the show -- unless you consider the shared facial features of Warren Buffet and Cthulhu. (That's a joke.) Luckily, there's Dennis Hollingsworth's single contribution, "Whistling in the Dark," a gooey evocation of twilight that feels like the proper closure for a show called Near Dark.

Naturally, there's a lot of fun to be had in a group grope like this. Unlike other anthologies that have appeared at Donna Beam in recent months, Near Dark doesn't strive to be significant in ways it can't possibly satisfy. Instead, Rock and his posse of futuristic-minded peers present viewers with a mix of styles and subject matters that share only an atmospheric concern rather than a weighty symbolic mission. Best of all, Near Dark has inspired me to hit Hollywood Video this weekend in order to locate a VHS copy of Bigelow's film.

(Image: "Work From the Faith Culture #06," by Neal Rock)