Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art: Summer Exhibitions

Alexa Hoyer, Suspended Circle, 2016, archival pigment print on Dibond, Tested Ground (05/26- 09/16/2017), UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

The UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art continues its 50th anniversary programming with four summer exhibitions featuring sculpture, drawing, photography, found objects, installation, and film. They are "connected by overarching questions about our place in the physical world."  The press release is after the jump. 
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Barrick Museum of Art
Summer Exhibition
Receptions
Friday May 26
5 - 8 p.m. 

Friday May 26, from 5 - 8 p.m. 

​The Barrick Museum of Art exhibition hall will feature Tested Ground, a curation of object and site-sensitive art by Andreana Donahue, Alexa Hoyer, Joan Linder, Jenny Odell, and Nicolas Shake.

In the Teaching Gallery, Play On, Gary, Play On places the work of Richard Francisco next to rarely-seen objects from the Barrick’s early anthropological collections.

New York artist Katarina Jerinic makes her Nevada debut with Astronomy of the Asphalt Ecliptic, a new work created specially for the Baepler Xeric Garden; and a season of three short films by Indianapolis artist Casey Roberts opens in the Barrick Auditorium.

“All of the artists have a connection to Southern Nevada," says Alisha Kerlin, Interim Director. "Many of the works were made in direct response to the desert environments surrounding Las Vegas—all of them invite the viewer to contemplate our relationship to the land we rely on.”

Tested Ground 
(05/26/17 - 09/16/17)
Opening Reception on Friday, May 26, 2017 (5-8pm)
Tested Ground is a major artistic exploration of the way in which our civilization uses the land around us for work, recreation, and waste disposal. Paying special attention to the region surrounding Las Vegas, five American and international artists use a variety of media to probe a relationship we sometimes take for granted. Showcasing the firing range imagery of photographer Alexa Hoyer; the anthropological trash project of Jenny Odell; Joan Linder’s meticulous radioactive waste site drawings; Nicolas Shake and Andreana Donahue’s investigations of desert debris and urban artifacts --Tested Ground represents a thought-provoking cross-examination of the American landscape.

Andreana Donahue: A site-attentive artist and curator who creates objects in response to vanishing regional traditions and the history of the spaces they inhabit, Las Vegan Andreana Donahue is also the co-founder of Disparate Minds, a multidisciplinary project dedicated to presenting the work of marginalized self-taught artists in the context of contemporary art. Donahue has exhibited in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Juneau, Alaska, where she spent a year as a Visiting Artist at the progressive art studio, The Canvas. In Fall 2017 she will undertake two Icelandic residencies, at the Icelandic Textile Center (Textílsetur Íslands) and SÍM.

Alexa Hoyer: Through photography and other media, New York-based German artist Alexa Hoyer searches for the unstated sense of purpose that haunts the marginalized and overlooked – homemade gun targets at unauthorized desert shooting ranges, storefront windows, derelict and abandoned billboard structures, and vitrines at natural history museums. Her work has appeared in the Inside-Out Museum, Beijing, the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA, the Open Museum – Broken Home, Hamburg, and many locations across New York City, including { TEMP } Art Space in Tribeca and the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill in the Bronx.

Joan Linder: An environmentally-engaged artist whose drawings form a record of buried chemical dumps and radioactive landscapes, New Yorker Joan Linder infuses observational drawing techniques with psychological depth. Linder is a graduate of Columbia University, a former resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the recipient of a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. She has exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Gwanjgu Art Museum, Korea.

Jenny Odell: Inspired by sources as varied as Google Maps and a city garbage dump, San Francisco artist Jenny Odell collects, sorts, tags, and researches her found material in a search for the surreal truth of the infrastructure that sustains our urban lives. With The Bureau of Suspended Objects she brings unexpected depth to the everyday activity of discarding trash. Odell’s work has appeared at La Gaîté Lyrique, France, the Lishui Photography Festival, China, the Fotomuseum Provincie Antwerpen, Belgium, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco.

Nicolas Shake: Los Angeles artist Nicolas Shake gathers and casts urban detritus and natural materials in order to explore the entropic borderland that lies between the suburbs and the open desert. He has shown his work at Gallery Lara, Tokyo, Western Project, Culver City, California, and VAST Space Project, Las Vegas. Shake’s shovel-shaped sculpture Untitled, 2013, appeared in the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition Recent Acquisitions.

Play On, Gary, Play On, curated by D.K. Sole 
(05/26/17 - 09/16/17) 
Opening Reception on Friday, May 26, 2017 (5-8pm)
What does it mean to pick something up? How do we negotiate the interaction between ourselves and the universe? Play On, Gary, Play On is a meditation on the point in time between an action being anticipated and the moment when it is carried out. Imaginatively it reinterprets this delay through a series of objects: a wooden wall sculpture by the New York artist Richard Francisco, an assembly of traditional Mexican masks, and a number of rarely-seen anthropological objects from the Barrick Collection. The title of the exhibition has been taken from a moment in the 2016 Australian Football League Grand Final when players hesitated because they wrongly believed Swans player Gary Rohan was about to receive a free kick. “Play on, Gary,” shouted one of the umpires, “play on.” Curator D.K. Sole says, “The idea of several contrasts mingling in this small space of time seemed interesting to me —the notions of assertiveness and intent coexisting with incompleteness of action.” 
Richard Francisco: A creator of mostly small-scale objects in wood, paper, cloth, and paint, California-born artist Richard Francisco joined the New York art world in the early 1970s, a time when artists were questioning the prescriptive tenets of 1960s minimalism. Francisco himself asserted a belief in the essential fluidity of genre boundaries, stating, “I would rather build a drawing than draw a drawing.” His colorful post-minimalist works were favorites of the respected art collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.

Astronomy of the Asphalt Ecliptic 
(05/26/17 - 01/20/18) 
Opening Reception on Friday, May 26, 2017 (5-8pm)
New York artist Katarina Jerinic responds to and intervenes in the built landscape with maps, photographs, and other imaginative ephemera that encourage unfamiliar explorations of everyday surroundings. Located in the Baepler Xeric Garden and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art lobby, her Astronomy of the Asphalt Ecliptic charts constellations of visible and invisible phenomena in the surrounding city. Jerinic has exhibited work nationally, internationally, and in many locations throughout New York City, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, Queens, and BRIC, Brooklyn. She is a 2017 Workspace Resident at BAXTER ST at Camera Club of New York.
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Sometimes I Dream of Myself as Two People and Other Stories 
(05/26/17 - 09/16/17) 
Opening Reception on Friday, May 26, 2017 (5-8pm)
Screening Schedule: Tuesdays (11- 12pm), Friday and Saturday (1-4pm) and by appointment
Working in video, painting, and cyanotype, Indianapolis artist Casey Roberts creates contemplative tableaux-like depictions of the tense dichotomy between mankind and the natural world. His esoteric visual fantasies conceal an imaginative playfulness under a veil of mystery. The Barrick is screening three of Robert's short films: I Think I Know What the Problem Is (2012), Sometimes I Dream of Myself as Two People (2015), and The Bird Sessions (2016). Roberts was a recipient of the 2007 Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship and has exhibited in a number of galleries and museums, including the Elmhurst Art Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. His work is included in the collections of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and the Indiana State Museum. He is currently represented by PARTS Gallery in Ontario and Walker Contemporary in Boston.

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