Heather Beardsley, Folding City
Heather Beardsley, from the series, Folding City-Las Vegas, collage and light sensitive dye on fabric, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
At the Rogers Studio Gallery, December 20th, 2019 (one night only)
By D.K. Sole
We have a few artist-in-residence programs in Las Vegas at the moment – the Bellagio and the Neon Museum both brought people here during 2019 -- but the most consistent and prolific one that I’m aware of is the new Rogers Art Loft residency, which started with the Chicago-based artist Ayanah Moor last June and continued for the rest of the year – five more artists at one month per artist -- with another eight slated for 2020. Each artist is asked to give, separately, a talk about their work, and a one-night show. They come from different parts of the United States. (Rodrigo Lara Zendejas, the artist who was in town last July, hails from Mexico originally but he’s based in Chicago.)
Both the media they work in and the approaches they take are usefully eclectic -- wiccan performance art, ceramic figure sculpture, screenprinted posters tweaking racist wrongs, etc. None of them, as far as I’ve seen, have fallen into the trap that lies in wait for any artist who comes to Las Vegas from somewhere else, namely, believing in the advertising hype and mistaking the city for an easily-colonized pushover. Hearing Sharbreon Plummer, their October artist from Louisiana, explain her intention of researching the history of West Las Vegas by consulting Special Collections at the Lied Library sounded invigorating in a city whose reputation, in the wider non-local art world, tends to wander around the question of whether a truncated Venice with a bright blue chlorinated canal should be considered a simulacrum, or a lesson for architects, or neither.
Heather Beardsley, their final artist of the year, produced three rooms of small fabric collages that reacted to the city’s standard image by behaving as if it didn’t exist. Standing there on 7th Street in the old home of MCQ Fine Art – now renamed the Rogers Studio Gallery -- you were invited to imagine that the whole extroverted decades-long advertising campaign was a dream, and Las Vegas had always been a self-enclosed Gormenghast cloistered behind jungles of giant cactuses. In her vision the casinos became grey, or softly brownish-pink. Sometimes they shrank apart and tilted, off-kilter, on billows of orange rock, as if the desert had turned to water and swept them aside in a flood. A man poled a gondola across the earth-waves outside a newspaper-coloured Venetian. Like an advertiser she pictured the city from the outside, its citizens mostly invisible aside from the jokey gondolier (and this in itself was an interesting contrast to the earlier community-powered artists like Lara and Plummer), but here the absence of people was like the absence of animals in a landscape photograph: the environment naturally overwhelmed them, they were transient, their nests were fragile, they were superseded by eternity as it expressed itself in mountains or in dumb, aggressive spurts of flora.
Heather Beardsley, from the series, Folding City-Las Vegas, collage and light sensitive dye on fabric, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
Beardsley, who was born and raised on the East Coast, told me her formative vision of the American West came from old photographs. That seemed satisfying because it corresponded so well to what I was looking at – these sepia-toned handkerchieves whose phototransferred buildings had been hazed and marked by the process until they blended into the overall impression of a set of elderly artifacts. Glue had puckered the fabric a little into three dimensions. Usually she covers the images with embroidery, she said, but a four-week residency wasn’t long enough for that and she had experimented with this new way of working. A minor amount of embroidery nonetheless lingered like snow pimples on a few fabric hillsides. It was, she added, also good to have artworks she could carry off in a folder without worrying about storage space.
Not all of them would go with her. One would stay. “Specific obligations include … leaving behind one physical or ephemeral work of art for the Rogers Foundation Fine Art Collection,” say the residency guidelines. Does that mean we’ll get to see some of these artworks again? It’s not likely that most people are going to be able to catch every single culminating show, and a group exhibition would give us an idea of the breadth of the program, plus a chance to measure its achievements.
More on the Rogers Art Loft Residency 2020 Programming
Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.
Posted by Wendy Kveck on January 25, 2020