2 or 3 Things I Know About Abstraction
Nanda Sharif-Pour and Ali Fathollahi, Ten57 Vol. 2, 2020, video
2 or 3 Things I Know about Abstraction
Nima Abkenar, Ali Fathollahi, Scott Grow, Christopher Jones, Maureen Halligan, Brian Henry, Jennifer Henry, Homero Hidalgo, Holly Lay, Cory McMahon, Lisa Rock, and Nanda Sharif-pour
January 12 - March 23, 2021
Summerlin Library, 1771 Inner Cir Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89134
by D.K. Sole
Curated by longtime UNLV Art Department professor Pasha Rafat, 2 or 3 Things I Know about Abstraction is a what-are-they-doing-now glimpse into a group of (mostly) former UNLV art graduates, the majority of them working in an ambiguous region between factual presentness and physical absence or flatness. Their evasiveness inserts a delay between you and the decisive seeing moment that a different set of artworks would have put immediately up front. Brian Henry’s piece, for example, is a notebook page of handwritten code with no computer that would offer you a chance to unriddle it. If you try to read through its disguise you can probably guess what you’re going to see once you type it in (if you ever do), but until then your attention is invited to fall on the sleek black pedestal, the personality of the pen marks, the way the pages of the notebook are admitting to their analogue nature by curling and refusing to stay open, and everything else that you never expected the artist to ask you to look at. Everything around the information in the piece, is the piece.
Other works reroute you in variously melancholy or ambiguous or straightforward or recessive ways. Ten57 Vol. 2, by Nanda Sharif-pour and Ali Fathollahi, asks you to navigate a QR code to see found footage of the family that used to own the house they live in. (Faded images of 1960s children run through the rooms in pajamas.) Christopher Jones’ saggy plastic mattress promises you that it was once full of air and coated on the front with blue tempera, but today the air is leaving, and a sheet of paper has been left on the floor to catch the molting feathers of paint. Like the family in the footage, it exists in your knowledge of what it isn’t. Holly Lay’s rug is not a rug. Four of the stripes in Homero Hidalgo’s triptych painting-esque entity have decided that being a decorative design element is not enough and so they extend forward into the room like the legs of an unfolded easel, keeping you at bay.
The gallery itself is an odd scut of an amoebic side room with an exit door in the back that must lead to some librarian-oriented place because while we were there several of them walked through, talking together as if they were on their way to lunch. I had a flash of vision from someone else’s perspective: this gallery, the goal of our long drive out to Summerlin, was, to other people, only a corridor they needed to rush through to reach the thing that mattered, namely, whatever was on the other side of that door. In terms of presentation it was a horrible room for these artworks (too small, too crammed, too adjacent to an indoor office window that hovered outside the entranceway like a spy), but its refusal to function in a way that let you settle in with confidence was not out of tune with the show.
Posted by D.K. Sole on February 20, 2021