Artists' Top Five: D.K. Sole
Bonnie Springs Ranch, photo D.K. Sole.
This ongoing series features short lists of artists' favorite things to do or see in Las Vegas.
1. Bonnie Springs Ranch: the area around the duck pond and restaurant.
This is the counterpoint to the famous Las Vegas cover-up of the past. Decay is permitted. Decay is presented delicately, like a treasure, as if it is new. But the ponies are fresh and brushed. An enduring installation.
2. The Calico Basin One walk at Red Rock Canyon on a crowded day.
On a busy day you are not only intimidated by the gross refinement of bulges and grottoes, you are also haunted by the polyphony of human voices shouting inane, mysterious rubbish at one another from the holes. The last time we were there an invisible child was screaming, “He’s farting, he’s farting on me,” from a pit near our feet and when we moved we saw that he was pointing at a beetle.
3. The sidewalk on Maryland Parkway across from UNLV
The Facebook President of the World -- I think his name is Jim Strohl? – has been inventing a repertoire of protest objects to draw attention to his unconvincing likes and hatreds: the Einstein’s Bagels bag held down with weights, the newspaper bent in a zig-zag across the kerb with rocks arranged in a triangle above the headline, the plastic bottle jammed inside a box and tied to a pole with a cord – this empty glittery thing flipping and clacking in the wind – polystyrene cups in trees – a good lesson in low-cost ingenuity.
4. The art section at the Lied Library.
The Lied Library at UNLV. Photo Mikayla Whitmore.
This is as close as we’re getting to Titian.
5. Supermarkets.
The shapes, the colours; the uniformity of purpose against the differences in framing.
D.K. Sole, Untitled, 2018, debris, papier-mâché
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.