Gallery Show Review No. 1 - Kevin Kremler

                I attended Kevin Kremler’s graduate thesis show in the Sheppard gallery on the 5^th of April 2012.  I was unfortunately unable to make his lecture.  The title of his show was “Postcards from the Gray Area”. 

                Kevin works in a variety of mediums, including drawing, sculpture and video.  His artist’s statement reads: “I make works to provide experiences that allow reassessment to the ever changing world around us.”  His thesis show consisted of four pieces.

                An electronic installation called “Show Card” consisted of a camera, projector, flatscreen monitor, and a printer.  The participant sat down in front of a large screen, where step by step instructions were posted to walk them through the piece’s process.  The end result produced a postcard that the participant could keep that replicated Norman Rockwell’s famous “Triple Self-Portrait”.  The next piece was an enormous drawing in crayon done on a wood board and suspended from the ceiling called “Crayola Vangola”, and it featured a portrait of Van Gogh done in Van Gogh’s distinctive late-impressionist style.  There was a video installation called “The seduction of Art in the Mind of a Willing Participant” and it featured about a dozen televisions showing video of a brain scan.  The last piece was a kinetic sculpture called “The Grey Area”, which involved a rotating frame that dropped sand in various patterns, controlled by participants that shoveled sand into it and spun it.

                I enjoyed the show immensely, and felt that it was a great insight into the mind of another artist.  It was intentionally enigmatic, but Kevin’s art speaks for itself.  My favorite piece was probably “Show Card”, because it was like nothing I had ever seen before.

Artist Lecture No. 2 - Jose Manuel Alfaro

I attended the graduate thesis lecture by Jose Manuel Alfaro on the 3^rd of May, 2012 and attended his thesis show.  The show and lecture were titled “Death, Drugs and La Linea”. 

                Manuel identifies as a Chicano political artist, and is influenced by the first wave of Chicano art from the 60’s and 70’s, as well as by the Mexican muralists of the 20’s and 30’s and Aztec art.  He works with large canvases, murals, and sculptures.  His work concerns the death and violence that surrounds the culture of the Mexican cartels, and the effect of the border (La Linea, or “the line”) and both Mexican and American politics on the narco culture.  He relates the glorification of death that exists in the cartels to a similar glorification of death that existed in the Aztec culture of human sacrifice and blood rites.  The paintings themselves are influenced by pop art and surrealism, as well as 60’s Chicano work and Aztec symbols.

                Manuel’s show consisted of a few large canvases and one sculpture.  I felt that his work did convey the sense of violence and hopelessness that exists along the Mexican-American border.  For me, the most striking images were two paintings that mirrored each other- one was of an American UAV (Unmanned Arial Vehicle) used to patrol the border, and the other was of a simple catapult constructed by a cartel to throw packets of drugs over the border.  The difference in technology was striking, and both were very well rendered in very bold colors and lines.  It really questioned how the cartels could ostensibly be winning the “War on Drugs” with such a huge gap in technology, and what that says about the seemingly endless violence of that “war”.  I also enjoyed the sculpture, a cartoon skull made of layers of wooden boards.

Artist Lecture No. 1 - Erik Burke

                I attended the guest lecture by Erik Burke on the 8^th of March, 2012.  Burke received a B.A. in Digital Media from UNR in 2005.  Since then he has been living in New York, while also taking extended trips around the world.

                Burke is primarily a street artist, dealing in various types of graffiti.  He began the lecture with an extensive history of contemporary graffiti and detailed his responses to that history.  Burk works in two basic modes with his graffiti: he has a simpler graphic “throw up”, which generally consists of a paper-airplane like form, sometimes rendered with a phrase along one line.  He often pairs this with his tag, “OverUnder”, or the shortened “OU”.  He also creates complex, surreal wheat-pastes and large scale murals that combine architectural elements with distorted human forms.  He has done murals at the behest of businesses, as well as on free walls and in public spaces.

                A few years ago, Burke and a fellow artist raised funds to go to Europe, where they completed a 3,000 mile bike ride from Portugal to Denmark.  They created and put up work on the way, and then had a gallery show in Copenhagen that dealt with the journey and the work produced on it.  This year, Burke and a group of artists travelled to India, where they put up dozens of wheat-pastes. 

                I personally really enjoy Burke’s work.  I think that his characterization of graffiti as essentially playful and rebellious is spot on, and I believe that many artists have created fantastic unsanctioned public pieces.  He moves beyond the idea of simple graffiti as a method of getting one’s name on a wall, and uses his work to tell stories and relate to the lives of the people in the surrounding neighborhoods.