Star * Dust * Desert is an online exhibition of art about Las Vegas’s contradictions and constructions. Strip architectures are shuffled and dealt in a cycle of implosion and rebuilding. Casinos give way to a strip mall sprawl. Desert dust swirls in neon light. An open blue sky is tiled with coral clay roofs. Framed by a jagged horizon of mountains, the desert shimmers like a mirage in the distance. 

Beyond the seductive nostalgia of fortunes lost and gained, Las Vegas continually remakes its image, turning over its artificial surfaces as they fade into obsolescence. In Las Vegas, the stars, dust, and desert are all readily reproduced into signs and souvenirs. A shelf of rhinestone keepsakes shine for a moment before something new sparkles in our starry eyes.

Karen Gu finds the iconography of Las Vegas in a sun-dried spill of Lucky Charms. Jo O’Lone-Hahn uses performance and analog film photography, working with models in kitschy star masks to examine the “starry-eyed” world of tourists on the Las Vegas Strip. Alternately, Cida de Aragon explores displacement, vertigo, and hallucinogenic visions of the desert; frantic suburban sprawl consuming the natural landscape, transforming it into gated communities, surveilled from above. Jeanine Diehl references casinos past to speak to ideas of loss, ephemerality and the city’s cycles of demolition through paintings on cardboard depicting playing cards with nostalgic facades. Aaron Cowan surveys the cleansed history of Southern Nevada’s atomic testing history and its mediated representations as he ponders the Museum’s adage, “even bananas have radiation.”

Star * Dust * Desert is an exhibition of new work by artists in Wendy Kveck’s Spring 2021 UNLV contemporary art seminar, “Finding America in Las Vegas.” Strip Cultures: Finding America in Las Vegas by the Project on Vegas published by Duke University Press in 2015 was an entry point for the seminar.