Diversified III

Diversified III: installation with various artists

Diversified III at the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, Las Vegas

by D.K. Sole

There have been several of these Donna Beam shows with members of the UNLV arts faculty in them. I thought I should mention one so that we have some sort of record, in the future, that they took place. Who remembers the all-woman show that Jerry Schefcik curated here after the pandemic lockdown, besides the people who were in it? The problem is that I work in the museum on campus and I know some of the artists. Keep that in mind while you read this, I suppose. Bias!

Choosing artists by the place they work rather than their themes or materials or methods virtually ensured that the art in Diversified III would find its strongest context outside the show itself. It’s not just that I wanted to be nice about Chloe Bernardo’s Sulyap (Glance) because I work with her, but also because I know some of the art she’s seen elsewhere and I could imagine how this model of a window could be compared to the tweaked models of traditional wooden Filipino doors created by Maria Villote, an artist from California whose website I know she’s looked at. Bernardo’s window was paneled with capiz shells with lights shining through to bring out the delicate images of Filipino foods painted on the backs of their translucent surfaces. With a grid of the wooden window struts cutting through them they seemed to be hovering on absent surfaces inside a house. The wood and the electrical light cord running to the socket in front of me were plain and real; the food was insubstantial. It suggested a fairytale illustration: once upon a time as a child in the Philippines the artist had these foods existing casually in front of her, but now that she was in Las Vegas she had to make a special effort to force them to stay. Sulyap made that effort obvious. I thought of the black and white kitchen drawings of the late Dawn Clements, an attempt to pin down something that can’t help ceasing to exist.

Across the gallery I saw John McVay’s sculpture The King in Yellow and Le Petit Prince, a pair of bulgy yellow columns on either side of a light bulb on a metal stand. Having looked at his work on and off for several years before this, I guessed these towers were intended to suggest something to do with masculinity; maybe erect penises made weird and disgusting, their lumpiness like tubes of glowing shit. One was shorter than the other. Each stood on a cassette recorder that made a throat-clearing noise with gushing erasures as if the wind were blowing over a microphone. I remembered his inside-out toy face chattering and vibrating at Test Site Projects in 2021. Now the single voice was a conversation. A review in the Scarlet & Gray tells me they’re a father and son talking to one another but I’m not sure where the writers found that information, unless there’s a commentary somewhere that I overlooked, or the journalists spoke to McVay (which they probably did).

I think I was most struck by the techniques he deployed to create ambiguity; the human-sized forms that resisted my efforts to see them as human, the incoherent snarl of the noise that was presented like a meaningful chat, the lightbulb that suggested the shape of an outdated microphone on a stand (both lighting and listening), and also my awareness of some words I knew he’d written about the piece’s dominant color: “Yellow doesn’t align itself fully with either sunshine or piss, it seems to want to be both and neither at the same time, a fluidity of allegiance between good or bad.” There was the title as well. The Little Prince is sweet and curious, but The King in Yellow is a play that, according to Robert W. Chambers’ book of the same name, drives you mad when you read it. A deliberate supernatural threat, in other words. “Yellow is an enigmatic and complicated color …” 

Thinking about ambiguity now, and the usefulness of incoherent noises, I responded to them both again when I encountered them upstairs in a work by Yasmina Chavez, a video with three inset scenes. In the first one a healthy sunflower was alienated in an artificial setting, but safe; in the second one a person approached (the same?) sunflower curiously before pulling its petals off and sticking them on their forehead; in the third one the flowers were unassaulted in a wild field, but they bowed down, they weren’t upright and sunny. Throughout it all a happy, voicelike noise babbled out of the images without being obviously uttered by either the flowers or the person. Thinking of it against The King in Yellow, I noted that unease didn’t have to have McVay’s harsh sound to be effective; the essential thing seemed to be this idea of unspeaking speech.

There were other pieces up here: a new arrangement of the burnt-out ceramic animals Chavez exhibited in 2014 at Tastyspace on Fremont Street (such a good show), three photographs of fashionable Goths by Angela Terrible Ortaliza, translucent collages by Keeva Lough, prints by Erik Beehn (familiar from his Savidan show last year), a mat piece by Emily Sarten (nice use of the floor but the scale felt off in that space), and a video by McVay and Sarten with more chattering in the background. This time the sound was a human voice telling men how to manage their appearances. The element that was, in Chavez and The King, the source of an omniscient unease, was now pointing me towards a critique, something focused on the ways we are told to behave and seem, and perhaps on differences and similarities in beauty standards for men and women.

I know that this was not the only way to look at Diversified III. I realize that someone else who wanted to write about the show might start with Bernardo’s window, as I did, then use that to point out the windowlike qualities of the squares in Beehn’s prints, and continue onwards into other instances of squares and framing and formal containment. (Sarten drawing attention to the unreality of a nature print by blocking it into a triangle and putting a rock through it, for example. Jung Min’s fleshy mutants inside their neat frames.) The show was a mixed bag of things, so that’s possible. You could ignore the idea of uneasiness altogether by focussing on Andrea Pavles’ depiction of plastic toys and the abstract paintings by Rebekah Andrade.  The exhibition is over now (I took too long writing this) but I wish I had been able to learn more about the ways that other people experienced it.

Diversified III, Rebekah Andrade, Suzanne Acosta, Florence Baker-Wood, Erik Beehn, Chloe Bernardo, Eric Burwell, Yasmina Chavez, Daniella Courban, Aaron Cowan, Keeva Lough, John McVay, Jung Min, Angela Ortaliza, Andrea Pavles, Emily Sarten, and Rebekah Venturini.

Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, Las Vegas
September 1 - October 20, 2023

Image courtesy of D.K. Sole.

Posted by D.K. Sole. Published by Ellie Rush on November 6, 2023.