CCAI: Grad Night

I can't hope to do a better job of summarizing the Capital City Art Initiative's current show, "Grad Night," than Brett M. Van Hoesen did. Hoesen is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at UNR, and her essay on the show is here. The show itself features work by recent graduates of the Art Departments of both Sierra Nevada College and UNR, and runs at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery through September 2. The exhibiting artists are Bryan Christiansen, Aimee Doran, Jeff Erickson, Jonathan Farber, Jonah Harjer, Ahren Hertel, Christina Lee, Jocelyn Meggait, James Nagel, Dominique Palladino and Melissa Swanson. Here are a few pics I snapped at the reception:

Aimee Doran's BFA show opening

Here are some pics from Aimee's talk and show. I think she succeeded in creating a real atmosphere in the gallery, complete with its own saran wrap weather. She said her work was concerned with neglected or abandoned spaces. A horizontal tornado made of clingfilm is suspended from the ceiling, with an array of lights trained on it, and a trio of lenses set hanging on the far side. My favorite part of the show is the shadow of the tornado/chrysalis/cloud, which the lenses attenuate, congealing bits of it into sharper relief, like clumps of hair or clusters of ganglia emerging from the blurred cotton candy adumbration. Under a slanted bedlike structure, a video shows images shot from within the saran wrap vortex. At different times, the video seemed like it was shot from the vantage point of an fly's eyeball, being wrapped in spiderweb; from an angelic transit between this world and the next; or from (and I mean this as a compliment) some ectoplasmic colonoscopy.