SURFACE TENSION: THE BARREN, THE DESPONDENT AND THE VOID

Organizer: Cynthia Nourse Thompson and David Charles Chioffi

 

Participants:

Katie Baldwin, Denise Bookwalter, Macy Chadwick, David Charles Chioffi, Xenia Fedorchenko, Beth Grabowski, Kyle Holland, Alex Kirillov, Christine Koch, Sean P. Morrissey, Karen Oremus, Nicole Pietrantoni, Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Shelley Thorstensen 

ABSTRACT

“The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.” —Norman Mailer

 

Mailer’s visions are of a vibrant time and the glow of his once embellished city have vastly dimmed. As an extension of the conference theme, terrains which are more fragile and despondent than the vibrant electric marquees and illuminated excesses are sought to be considered. In this portfolio of diverse works, the viewer will experience a vast and barren space not through its contents but through its voids. To the artists included, the barren is more tangible than the burgeoning metropolis’ guise of Las Vegas. Such abject vistas are desired to be investigated equally within historical and contemporary realizations— the arid and the scorched; thirst; the disenfranchised and the forgotten; the dim exteriors and the dystopian perspectives; an uncertain economy; vacancy and sprawl; and silence. The format of the panorama is to be employed to fully capture the artist’s interpretations in this traditional wide-format and horizontal perspective.