Santa Cruz-based artist Andrea Borsuk will create a new site-specific mural installation portraying the journey from the California coast to the Nevada desert. By layering paintings, drawings, and objects on top of a wall mural to imply a narrative trajectory, Borsuk explores the precarious notion of time and destiny.

“I am fascinated by our cultural obsessions with the various rituals and talismans that we subscribe to for protection, good luck and safety in our daily lives,” explains the artist. “Horseshoes, rabbit’s feet, and safety devices–all are mementi mori—signs and reminders of the precarious nature of life and our need for all kinds of faith. Referencing the three sisters of fate from Greek mythology, my narrative toys with the notions of divine powers and the hopes we may cast upon these eclectic ‘goddesses’ for bestowing upon us fortune and survival.”

Featured as jewels on an elaborate ‘thread of life,’ Borsuk’s cast of characters are reveling in and ultimately submitting to the journey of life—an unpredictable and ever-changing ride.

Watch a video of Borsuk’s journey from Santa Cruz to Reno, NV here. (Link)

timepaths is a process-based, multi-media installation by Reno-born artist Franklin Evans that investigates the complex paths he’s taken as a contemporary artist. Now living in New York and showing in galleries internationally, Evans first started painting at Stanford University as an undergraduate in 1987. At that time university art programs tended to maintain distinct boundaries between various media. Evans, however, sought a more complex visual language and began to explore the dissolution of distinct media through collaborations with choreographers, writers, and curators. His resulting installations take on the appearance of labyrinthine studio spaces where materials from diverse times and places in his life provide context and are given equal attention.

The installation at the Nevada Museum of Art will consist of multiple intersecting systems of work that Evans has been developing over the past five years. Among them will be photoappropriation, a visual exploration of the artist’s own personal family photographs; curationappropriation, a system that explores the artist’s relationship to the contemporary art gallery system; wallmemoryskin, which specifically refers to past wall installations, and wallnotes and readingnotes that combines the artist’s diaristic excerpts from his journals and audio notes. All of these will be experienced in relation to Evans’ signature tape screens made from painted canvas strips that he refers to as painthallstage.

Sponsors

Ms. Chris Mattsson, Carole Server and Oliver Frankel, Mr. and Mrs. Michael C. Stanley, Wynn Resorts, City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, and the Nevada Arts Council , a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency

Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis installation is the first large-scale artwork created in Antarctica. This milestone of contemporary land art, widely acknowledged to be both a stunning and ecologically sensitive intervention on the continent, has received international acclaim. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis was installed on the Ross Ice Shelf on December 22, 2006—concurrent with the summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. This exhibition features original objects and archive materials from the 2006 project. In conjunction with the exhibition, SKIRA Rizzoli, New York will publish the first major publication on Lita Albuquerque.

Nolan Preece, a photographer for over forty years, has devoted his work to understanding and mastering the challenging techniques of early photography and conceiving of new photo-based processes at the same time. In the late 1970s and early 80s, his fondness for experimental photography led him to originate a photographic abstraction process that employed chemical masking techniques and staining in conjunction with a printed image.

Preece called his resulting prints “chemograms,” but after recently engaging with a group of artists using similar processes—most notably Pierre Cordier of Brussels, Belgium—Preece has taken to using the term “chemigram” to describe his prints. This exhibition features Preece’s chemigrams produced over the past three decades.

Preece served as galleries curator and art professor at Truckee Meadows Community College for eleven years before retiring in 2010. He is also known for his landscape portfolios of the United States and the West, as well as his Great Basin wall series that are now documents of a changing environment. Preece’s photographs are in the collections of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah; the Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City; the Nevada Museum of Art; and most recently, the Southern Graphics Council Archives in Mississippi.