Three short summaries of Artistic events

Clairissa Stephens is a Graduate student at UNR. She works with the landscape of Northern Nevada, and is inspired by its beauty, and the beauty of the human experience. She works with many different mediums, from porcelain to paper, trying to capture the beauty of what she sees on her treks into nature. Her goal is to “[seek] to trace the small details and embody the connections I perceive in the landscape.” In her latest gallery, ‘Nevada Horizon Lines,’ she accomplished this by focusing on lines, and the spaces that they create. She makes maps of paper out of lines, and draws connections in her gallery from one piece to the next. She uses silverleaf on the walls and the pieces, flowing them together so that the each one becomes part of a whole. By simplifying the landscape and also making the maps 3-dimensional, she draws the viewer in and allows them to see the landscape from a different perspective. In ‘Interior West,’ she draws all of her talents together to make the viewer really place themselves in the wilderness, and make the connection between nature and art.

Colby Stephens is a political artist. He says that his work “seeks to synthesize his research, and similarly unpack it for the viewer.” He is also a writer, and he incorporates his political writings into his art, telling the viewer a story, if the viewer so chooses to delve deep enough. In his gallery ‘American Pantheon,’ he combines a myth that he wrote with his artwork, mostly sculptures, to tell a political story. He uses wavelengths from radio talk shows to make two roosters fight, representing two of the characters from his myth. He also has life-size sculptures of an elephant and a donkey, which can be as simple as that to someone who isn’t paying attention, but when one looks deeper, the political not-so-undertones become apparent and even overwhelming. The rest of his art follows this pattern as well. He makes a powerful statement with each and every piece, and it doesn’t take much digging in his website to find the strongly worded political essays that he has written.

The last event I attended was the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art. In the museum, I saw everything from classical paintings to modern sculpture, and of course, the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. His work is strikingly amazing, and it was a privilege to be able to see his pieces in person, instead of through the internet, as I have throughout my life. He manages to capture realism with a surprisingly messy style, and each of his pieces was instantly recognizable as his. The museum had many of his pieces, and it was easy to see how his work changed over the years. All of his pieces have a sort of excitement to them; they all are full of life. His paintings were incredibly inspiring, and it was different to see a famous painter’s works displayed for the world to see, rather than at an auction or in a class.