Nima Abkenar: 3200 Gaucho Drive Las Vegas, NV 89169

Nima Abkenar, 3200-3, 2022, Fireplace corner wall, tiles, JVC VHS TV combo, yellow neon light, wooden bookshelves

Nima Abkenar, 3200 Gaucho Drive Las Vegas, NV 89169 at Test Site Projects

by D.K. Sole

This exhibition, like all of Nima Abkenar’s projects, is elegant, intelligent, and beautifully executed. With fastidious perversity it sets its refinement against boring materials – spray-on wall texture and a uniform coat of uninflected whitish paint – things you’d expect to see in a rental property after it had been cleaned up cheaply by the landlord. It’s a replica of the artist’s home, or that’s what the text on the wall tells me. “The four pieces presented here are curated areas of the artist’s residence. … The design elements are specific to the artist’s home.” But it doesn’t tell me anything about him. I don’t see the books he reads or the clothes he chooses to hang in his wardrobe, or any trinkets, mail, magazines, rugs, coffee mugs, any of the details that a different artist might scatter around a houselike installation to convince you that it really is a home. His weirdly small bookshelf is empty, his suspiciously ancient VCR/TV combo is tuned to a random channel. The only consistent decorative elements are fluorescent tubes and rolled-up sheets of paper that hide whatever is inside them. The materials list assures me they’re “prints” but prints of what? Only one object breaks the trend, a replica of a painting by Corey McMahon. When I was there, one of the other visitors – someone who was being noisily baffled by the replica walls - had decided that this painting was the art that he was meant to interpret. He pointed at the coloured shapes that McMahon had half-concealed with a film of milky paint, satirically telling his friends, “That’s a taxi …” I have a vision of the artist hanging up the very paintinglike painting in its prominent spot like an anglerfish erecting a light and waiting to see who would swim past the cool walls and bite at this enticing spot of heat.                                                                                              

Gaucho Drive is the opposite of Liza Lou’s maximalist Kitchen, to pick another example of a contemporary artist recreating a domestic space. Kitchen has illustrations on the wallpaper, sweet patterns on the fake curtains, and a box of branded cornflakes sitting out for an imaginary breakfast. Gaucho Drive has the blank surfaces of these rolls and tubes. Kitchen’s intact walls face inward; the furniture plants its legs on the floor. In Gaucho Drive the room has been taken apart. One of the fake walls is emphasising its lack of function by turning its back to me and looking out of the window. When I look at the thing the artist has named “livingroom wall” I can’t tell how it might fit with the “fireplace corner wall.” The text couches this evasiveness in the language of site-specific art. “While these items are specific to the gallery site, they exhibit something that primarily belongs to the original site. The duality of site-specificity in these pieces leads us to a site-less stance. These pieces are specific to one of these sites as much as they represent their own site.” The pieces are being born like babies, independent people with two parents. Babies are enigmatic; you can’t read their minds, and so they’re like these walls, private presences, unable to give themselves away, just as no person can explain themselves. If I bought a piece and took it home then it wouldn’t belong there either. An independent wall.

Independent but also vulnerable and scattered. ‘Home’ can be reproduced, broken up, taken to a gallery on Commerce Street, and sold. A similar series of implications hung around the cardboard unit interior Abkenar exhibited in 2021 at Las Vegas City Hall and then Sahara West Library. (Last time I went by the library it was still there.) Here was a home without its person. This home is not the corner-dream or cottage-dream that Gaston Bachelard embraces in his Poetics of Space, it’s the dream that establishes you in boundless placelessness, humming in the erasing glow of the fluoro. The home-fragments stand around hintingly in someone else’s environment. It’s as if he’s wondering what the place would look like if he had never moved in. As if he has pulled it apart and discovered that he isn’t there. Or that there was never really a there for him to be in.

Nima Abkenar, 3200 Gaucho Drive Las Vegas, NV 89169 at Test Site Projects, 1551 S Commerce St, Unit 1A Las Vegas, NV 89102. Through April 16, 2022

Published by Wendy Kveck on April 3, 2022.