Settlers + Nomads: 269 MILES
An evening of video and performance at artist-run BLAM projects in Los Angeles on August 20, 2016, 8:00 pm
Settlers + Nomads: 269 MILES is an evening of video and performance hosted by BLAM projects, an artist-run space in downtown Los Angeles. The programming is part of the gallery’s three-week event series “Hot August Nights” curated by artist Joe Wolek in conversation with the current gallery exhibition On the Distant Horizon. “Hot August Nights” turns BLAM projects into an evening event space featuring local and international artists during the last three weekends in August. The focus of “Hot August Nights” is interpretations of illusion built on inspiration derived from the specificity of locale. As part of this series Settlers + Nomads presents 269 MILES on August 20 at 8:00 pm: an evening of video and performance. BLAM projects is located at 1950 S. Santa Fe, #270, Los Angeles 90021.
269 MILES includes works by artists with a connection to Las Vegas that explores our relationship to place. The 269 MILES title refers to the distance between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The evening will commence with Las Vegas-based Andreana Donahue’s slide talk performance “Sunshine and Shadow: A Year in Alaska,” based upon her recent residency and work in Juneau, Alaska, informed by locality, desire and science fiction. Donahue’s site-determined installations highlight connections between outwardly unrelated narratives, disciplines, and symbols, creating a hybrid lexicon.
Donahue’s talk will be followed by a screening of eleven artists’ videos made in Las Vegas, about Las Vegas or by former Las Vegans now living and exploring other cities, spaces and ideas.
Baltimore-based artist Catherine Borg’s digital video Self-tending is a stop-motion animation in which clear blocks cast by the artist, stack and un-stack themselves. Pointing to the role of contemporary architecture as spectacle in places like Las Vegas and Dubai, as well as the rapid transformation of cities like New York, the animation playfully suggests the next development in architecture--automated, regenerative construction. Borg lived in Las Vegas from 2004-2011.
Javier Sanchez’ video Charro: Good Company, recorded with iPhone 5s and 6s, considers how the portability of new media alters our experience and relation to place. Born in the suburbs of Mexico City, Sanchez now lives and works in Buffalo New York. By switching roles of stereotypes, Sanchez explores new media through an open field of diverse subjects including cultural identity and decolonization of aesthetics. By focusing on the formal aspects of the medium itself, he investigates how media transforms cultural identity through cinema and television. Sanchez lived in Las Vegas from 2001 to 2015.
Other video works explore place through themes around nostalgia and desire; the commodified and aging female body; the desert landscape and the legacy of earthworks; our country's founding right to freedom; and the racism of the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.
Following the screening, storyteller, artist and writer Danielle Kelly will share a Las Vegas tale about surveillance, manicures and damn good coffee. Kelly, whose project-based practice ranges from installation to performance, lived in Las Vegas for fourteen years and recently relocated to Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Participating S + N artists include: Lauren Adkins (Los Angeles), Audrey Barcio (Chicago), Catherine Borg (Baltimore), Mark Brandvik (Las Vegas), Yasmina Chavez (Las Vegas), Andreana Donahue (Las Vegas), Stephen Hendee (Baltimore), Brent Holmes (Las Vegas), Danielle Kelly (Las Vegas, NM), Wendy Kveck (Las Vegas), Javier Sanchez (Buffalo, NY), David Sanchez Burr (Las Vegas, NM), and Mikayla Whitmore (Las Vegas)
Danielle Kelly, performance still
David Sanchez Burr, video still, Oscillations: 36 37 02 N 114 20 41 W
Artist bios
Lauren Adkins is a photographer, art director, and educator based in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA in Photography from the Memphis College of Art in 2010 and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2013. She is a visual crusader, fiction junkie, and media literacy advocate who loves the art of storytelling and hates talking about herself in the third person. laurenadkins.com
Audrey Barcio is an interdisciplinary artist working with the questions surrounding the human condition. Her work has been published in “New American Paintings,” and recent projects include “Art in America” curated by Julie Torres at the Artist Run Art Fair in Miami, her public art installation “Continual Eventual” was recently on view at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery and “SPACE BETWEEN” a solo exhibition at the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, both in Las Vegas. She recently received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2016) and currently lives and works in Chicago.
Catherine Borg is a visual artist using photography, video, installation and drawing to examine and reflect cultural narratives. Her work has been exhibited and screened at venues including SFMOMA, MassMOCA, and the Contemporary Art Center Las Vegas (reviewed in Art in America) and realized through public art commissions for the Southern Nevada RTC, the City of Las Vegas and Scottsdale Public Art. She holds an MFA degree in Visual Arts from Rutgers University and a BA degree in Broadcasting from San Francisco State University and has received fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony and the Jentel Foundation. She currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
Mark Brandvik received his BFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1996 and his MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. Included in New AmericanPaintings, Top Ten Now Los Angeles, and recognized in Las Vegas Weekly as Best of 2014 for Narrative Sculpture, and the recipient of several grants, commissions, and residencies, his work has been exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe and is found in private, public, and corporate collections. He has taught art since 1997 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the College of Southern Nevada. The artist lives and works in downtown Las Vegas. markbrandvik.com
Yasmina Chavez is a first generation Mexican-American, born in California, raised in northern Nevada, who now lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a documentary artist who is inspired by candid people, geopsychological places, paradoxical circumstances, and sublime spaces. Her work consists of modular narrative multi-channel video and sculptural installations, sound art, performance works, and photography. In 2011, she co-founded 5th Wall Gallery in Las Vegas. She’s had three solo shows and has exhibited in group shows throughout Las Vegas including the 2012 and 2014 artist driven London Biennale, 2013 and 2014 Life Is Beautiful Festival, 2012 short film festival Spring Flicks, and 2010’s Off The Strip new genres festival. She recently exhibited new work in the group shows Chronodrift at Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon and Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Sino-American Digital Media and Video Exhibit at the Javits Center in New York City. Chavez received her MFA from the School of Art and Design-NYSCC at Alfred University from their Electronic Integrated Arts program and her BFA in photography from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. yasminachavez.com
Andreana Donahue is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator from Chicago. She has organized and participated in group and solo exhibitions throughout the US, including Alaska, Chicago, LA, Miami, and Nevada. Donahue’s project-based practice engages a wide range of methods and concepts, but always reflects a rigorous investigation of simulacra and the transformation of humble materials through labor-intensive processes. Her site-determined installations highlight connections between outwardly unrelated narratives, disciplines, and symbols, creating a hybrid lexicon. Heavily informed by location, her objects draw upon vanishing regional traditions while transmitting a sense of superstition, loss, and longing. Donahue is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center, 100 West in Texas, and a forthcoming residency at the Icelandic Textile Center in 2017. She lives and works in Las Vegas, NV. andreanadonahue.com
Stephen Hendee is a sculptor best known for producing large-scale architecturally ambitious installations. Inspired by a digital culture, he is considered a pioneering figure in the low-poly aesthetic, conveying vectorized properties to physical objects and materials, creating real world simulations of virtual reality space. The constructed works often reference film and literary sources. His work has been exhibited at PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, the New Museum, Sculpture Center LIC, and the Whitney Museum Of American Art at Altria in New York. Other national exhibitions include those at the Smart Museum, Chicago; the St. Louis Art Museum; and Rice University Art Gallery, Houston. He lives and works in Baltimore MD.
Brent Holmes is a multi-disciplinary artist with a deep affinity towards Historical, epistemological and ontologically themed creative projects. His primary objective is to nudge others into a conversation he finds interesting and then become distracted and walk away. His most recent work has centered around the philosophical and cultural consequences of Hellenistic hegemony and representations of antiquity within the modern era. Holmes also has sought to create a dialogue through several culinary projects, on the nature of communication, morality and identity, and would love to have you for dinner some time. The son of an entertainer, Holmes is thoroughly traveled but has never completely identified any one place as his home until moving to Las Vegas. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally on occasion, but primarily within southern Nevada where he has claimed residence for over a decade.
Through her work between painting, drawing, collage and performance Wendy Kveck digests pictures of women from art history and contemporary media, contemplating these images as cultural signifiers of excess, desire, anxiety, fear, regret and loss. Through staged and documented performances she transforms these images and roles to exaggerate their implication. Kveck earned her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Iowa. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and she is the recipient of a Jentel Artist Residency Fellowship and project grants from the Nevada Arts Council. 2016 exhibitions include a three-person exhibition at the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas) and “Tilting the Basin: Contemporary Art of Nevada” at the Nevada of Museum of Art in Reno. She lives and works in Las Vegas. Wendykveck.com
Danielle Kelly is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. Kelly’s project-based practice ranges from installation to performance and has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Portland,OR. Kelly has contributed to a variety of publications regionally in the southwest, including Desert Companion and the Las Vegas Weekly. She has also contributed exhibition catalog essays for Marjorie Barrick Museum, Springs Preserve, and VAST Projects. Kelly’s writing was included in the collection Fade, Sag Crumble. Most recently Executive Director and Curator of Las Vegas, Nevada’s Neon Museum. Kelly currently serves as the Executive Director for Surface Design Association.
Born in the suburbs of Mexico City, Javier Sanchez is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Buffalo New York. He incorporates sculpture, video, photography, sound, nature, light, performance and the community into his art practice. By switching roles of stereotypes, Sanchez explores new media through an open field of diverse subjects including cultural identity and decolonization of aesthetics. In his investigation, the most important is the formal aspects of the medium itself and how media have transformed our cultural identity through cinema and television.
David Sanchez Burr is a mixed-media artist and assistant professor of media arts and technology at New Mexico Highlands University. Born in Madrid Spain, David began his experimental sound and visual work in Richmond, Virginia while studying at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has exhibited and performed his work nationally and internationally at art centers, museums, and cultural spaces like the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, The International Symposium for Electronic Arts, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts in San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz Intervene:Interrupt conference on new practices, Stanford University as part of Performance Studies International, In-Light at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond Virginia, H2O Film on Water at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, and The Memphis Social an Apex Art Franchise Exhibit. Along with his art practice and teaching, David’s curatorial experience includes He is a published recording artist and has received recent awards from The Nevada Arts Council, The Media Arts Platform, ISEA, the Art Production Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. David received his masters degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2009.
Mikayla Whitmore, Las Vegas native and UNLV graduate, has exhibited at multiple Las Vegas venues including P3Studio at the Cosmopolitan, Contemporary Arts Center, and the Marjorie Barrick Museum. Her work explores the potential of the photographic image in an attempt to explore the way memory functions. During her solo residency ‘When the Night Comes’ she functioned as an archivist of memories seeking to re-order phantasmal visual instances in time, using overlooked objects to create an installation to create a lucid mindscape corrupting memories over the course of a month. She currently balances her studio practice with work as a staff photographer, researching dinosaur species, and planting succulents. mikaylawhitmore.com
Settlers + Nomads (S+N) is a collaborative work in progress cataloging a network of contemporary artists, thinkers and projects with ties to the Las Vegas region. The project’s website includes a blog featuring the writing of visual artist-contributors as well as Las Vegas contemporary art news and events listings; a curated roster of artists living and working in Las Vegas (Settlers) along with an ever-growing list of artists who have passed through and contributed to the presentation and discussion of art in Las Vegas (Nomads.); and highlights cultural destinations in downtown Las Vegas. S + N was founded by Las Vegas-based artist Wendy Kveck in 2015. 269 MILES is the first S + N project curated for a physical space. http://settlersandnomads.com
BLAM projects is an innovative exhibition model focused on creating a synergy between artists in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. These bicoastal, multiplatform exhibition spaces in downtown Los Angeles and the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn are designed to showcase a wide range of artists and curators from both sides of the country. The goal is to introduce the wealth of talent in both communities to a wider audience of art lovers, art writers, curators and collectors. The spaces also will bring selected international artists to audiences in the two cities. The dialogues continue outside gallery walls as BLAM partners with other alternative spaces, publications and organizations. BLAM was recently featured in ART AND CAKE LA as one of the nine must see alternative spaces in Los Angeles. http://www.blamprojects.com
For more information about Settlers + Nomads: 269 MILES contact wendy@settlersandnomads.com
For more information about Hot August Nights, On the Distant Horizon and BLAM Projects visit the BLAM projects website
All images courtesy the artists. Posted by Wendy Kveck