Shelbi Schroeder understands the playfulness and power of sexuality. This afternoon, as she talked about her work, there was a bubbly playful way about her. As a photographer, which she teaches in local academia, she knows the impact of image making and social posing.  When I shot her smile filling the room, Schroeder shifted her mood within two frames. That moment alone was a demonstration of her work that looks at "notions of purity and corruption in normative sexuality." The two shots could have illustrated the title of her current exhibition,  “Innocence and Deviance,”  her thesis show for the UNLV Fine Art graduate program. 

Held at Donna Beam Gallery, your eye goes straight to a mural in the corner. First you are guided by a row of small framed prints, an exercise of minimalist seduction, then you turn the corner at another set of prints that are a colorful build of subtle obsession.  The mural is a large-scale response to that build, a colorful climax trapped in a corner.  The real study is upstairs, where Schroeder becomes performance artist to support her work about purity and corruption. It’s not what you think. But then again, it may be. 

Her final set of scheduled performances will be Monday, March 16 to Wednesday, March 18, at 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.  An artist reception is Friday, May 13, the same night and across the lawn from Audrey Barcio's site specific exhibition at Grant Hall Gallery. The art jaunt between the two receptions starts at 6 p.m. and allows viewers to see how two woman artists work their rooms in different ways.

Audrey Barcio and her small paintings reflected in a mirror sculpture from  “There is more, but no more of this.” Photo: PtD

Mirrors, monitors, copper and masonite are some of the materials used in four segments of  “There is more, but no more of this,” a new installation by Audrey Barcio, UNLV MFA Fine Art candidate. Her midway exhibition is designed to work in the small space of Grant Hall Gallery and the newly painted white walls and polished floors were the artist's own laborious immersive experience. That makes the room frame the paintings, sculpture, video and sound sending out multiple meanings, a connotation based on existential givens of human existence. There's also subtext commenting on those wandering from subjective religious ideals. “By asking us to make connections while examining the beginning and end, it brings us together in the immediate,” writes the artist in her statement. It opened yesterday. The artist reception is March 9, on Friday the 13th, at 6 pm.  More at Facebook.

Also in this campus cycle, Shelbi Schroeder  "Innocence and Deviance"  is all about an artist responding to "notions of purity and corruption in normative sexuality. Using her body as a tool, she intervenes in daily female performance rituals." There will be a performance at 7 p.m. on Friday March, 13. More dates and times at Facebook. 

FIELD NOTE: Artist Izaac Zevalking two-year mark of working First Friday was profiled in the Las Vegas Sun. Through his Recycled Propaganda inventory of strong graphic design on prints, t-shirts, and stickers, he invites everyone to question everything and stir up cultural provocation. He’s also a street artist. On a wall adjacent to Atomic Liquors he had a mural of a winged aerosol can with a thought bubble quoting Albert Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” It’s gone now. The evidence of his creative process destroyed. The abandoned building and mural was razed in the weeks leading up to Life is Beautiful Festival 2014.

The concept behind his art is to allow people to think uninhibitedly about social, cultural and historical issues, reported the Las Vegas Sun. “Everything has an answer here. Everything is either wrong or right, black or white, and art is not like that,” Zevalking said in the interview. “My designs can have five different meanings.” With that permission to question everything, I get to think that the meaning of his style isn’t driving home social and political messages, but knowing how protest and commentary defines the work. That’s where the real cleverness is. Zevalking’s title, Recycled Propaganda, is an honest brand of ideas revisited and conviction of thoughts sampled to become well-crafted pop-subversiveness suitable for framing.

The Famous Dice Girls.