Forgotten Artifacts: a Group Exhibition of Cast Metal Sculptures by Las Vegas-based Artists

Emily Budd, Late Bloomer; and Handle for a Mace Head from Sodom and Gomorrah, Early Bronze Age (both 2021). Photo D.K. Sole

Forgotten Artifacts: a Group Exhibition of Cast Metal Sculptures by Las Vegas-based Artists at Core Contemporary

by D.K. Sole

Forgotten Artifacts is the largest and most varied display of locally-made cast metal sculpture I’ve ever seen in Las Vegas. The list of artists spans everyone from student members of UNLV’s Aluminati metalworking club (led by educator Emily Budd, also represented here) to longstanding professional artists like Chris Bauder. The gallery floor is forested with pedestals. Forms sit darkly or glisten silver. Ross Takahashi, who curates, rightly includes a number of his signature nature-themed works: metal urns bristling with metal twigs, a metal branch in a velvet-lined chest with a skull, a dead bird depicted on a wall-hung metal plate.

One of the points this show gets across is the range of different processes and aims artists can have when they’re working with cast metal, from Bauder inventing tools that summon up the spectre of a perverse dream-world, to Budd focusing on the textural and physical contrast between the friable surface of a kiln brick and the smooth gleam of the aluminum stalk that now grows out of it. Sometimes, as with Dominique Chavira’s tentacled bronze vessel that looks like a prop from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the artist seems to be acting out of a desire to possess a specific object they’ve only been able to picture in their imaginations. Wouldn’t life be better if I could hold that magical thing in my hand? Let’s find out.

The work is persistently tethered to the not-art world where the things that were cast exist. Looking at Eric Pawloski’s bronze replicas of toy deer in Novo, 2008, I thought about those same deer made of plastic. This way of working splits everything around you into two phases: the soft and temporary world that contains the original plastic deer and the toy Disney head from Bauder’s Christo-blasphemous Rat, 2022, and the metal world that has the potential to swallow them all up and give them back to you in different conjunctions. The artists, like ringmasters, make them participate in fantastic circus events, maybe symbolic or surreal ones, like Budd’s Well Hung Up, 2019, with a tongue and two fingers protruding from a telephone.

Takahashi uses that realism to make statements about the relationship between ourselves and another kind of nonhuman world, the natural one, writing, in his summary of his aims in his 2020 solo show at the Windmill Library gallery: “My work attempts to observe humanity’s struggles with nature and their intersecting life cycles throughout history. The goal of my work is to use the industry in nature and to preserve the natural world for people to see its beauty.” Here, realism asks us to treasure the decaying forms of nature at least as much as we value their neat hard dopplegängers. Do our reactions work like that? Perhaps? Or might we be so satisfied with this metal world that we decide it’s fine, good, all we need? Look at all the fun things we can do with it. See how solid our fantasies can become. They look unbreakable. 

Forgotten Artifacts: a Group Exhibition of Cast Metal Sculptures by Las Vegas-based Artists
Curated by Ross Takahashi
Artist Talks with Chris Bauder, Emily Budd, and Ross Takahashi, June 25 at 7PM.
Core Contemporary, 900 E. Karen Avenue, Suite D222, Las Vegas, NV 89109
Through July 22, 2022

Published by Wendy Kveck on June 24, 2022