Place/No Place
Stephen Galloway, Nevada Museum of Art
Stephen Galloway is a photographer and instillation artist based in San Francisco. Galloway has a truly unique style of nature photography. He incorporates abstract elements to his work. Scan based images compromise the majority of his works. There were five pieces in his exhibition. The first one was selection of photographs of these boulders where the subject of each photo was the void in between the boulders. The next was a diptych of a stone path with moss on a white background. It seems that Galloway used Photoshop to create the perfectly white background. The next piece of work was actually a skylight. He took a photo looking upwards through a canopy of pine trees, printed it, and applied it to the skylight to give the impression that the exhibition space is actually in a pine forest. Through this exhibit, he wanted to demonstrate how nature's existence is irrelevant to it's human definition and interpretation. It simply exists.
Possession
Various Artists, Sheppard Contemporary
Having walked past Sheppard Contemporary for years having never noticed it and never hearing of it, I was incredibly impressed with the quality of the works inside. All the art was enticing, but one artist who's work stood out to me the most was David LaChapelle. The series featured in this exhibition was
Earth Laughs In Flowers. This is a series of 10 large photographs where LaChapelle draws inspiration from the vanitas paintings, a type of traditional Baroque still life painting. Vanitas is a Latin word which translates to vanity. These paintings have traditionally commented on the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of earthly goods and pursuits. They usually featured wilting flowers to represent the mortality of life. One piece that stood out in particular was one called
America, which can be seen in Fig. 1. LaChapelle used the vanitas style as a starting point, but by adding contemporary elements, created a social critique of modern society. This piece comments on the superficiality of American pop culture.
Fig. 1: America is a commentary on the superficiality of American pop culture.
Story Generating Apparatus
Benjamin Poynter, Knowledge Center
Benjamin Poynter is a candidate for a Master in Fine Arts here at the University of Nevada. According to Poynter, he sees the world in a pixelated, two-dimensional form which has inspired his style of art. His genre of work is indie art video games that have profound messages attached with them. According to Poynter, there are two kinds of video games: narratological and computational.
In a Permanent Save State created by Poynter is an indie mobile game available for download for android phones. It provides a highly critical commentary on the human rights violations produced by Apple and Foxconn, the company that manufactures Apple products. This narratological game chronicles the afterlives of seven laborers who committed suicide. It was available in Apple's app store, but was later removed due to the critical commentary it presents.
The main purpose of the event however was to highlight Poynter's new work titled
Story Generating Apparatus. It is a game in which the viewer is immersed into a virtual reality modeled by Poynter all from memory to replicate a mall in his hometown that was a site of meaningful memories for him. Since the mall is no longer used, he wanted to recreate it so that the viewer could experience the setting and the memories that Poynter experienced there.
