Nowhere: Out of Place at Disjecta
“Trajectory,” Brennan Conaway. still
You’ll recall the Nowhere collective and its mobile gallery, a white travel trailer modified to display art inside and out, parked at various locations around town. Now a similar travel trailer with its interior painted international orange, two opposite corners sliced cleanly away to create wide circular openings, welcomes the viewer to Out of Place now on view at Disjecta (8371 N Interstate). It’s an excellent exhibition featuring work by collective members Matt McCalmont, Brennan Conaway and Charissa Niles—resulting from their residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation . In their explorations of the desert (and the resulting work), the collective discovered and considered leavings and legacies associated with this isolated place.
Conaway’s “Trajectory” is a documentary video recording his “weapons test” featuring the “gun that won the west.” Out in the middle of these mud flats, he shoots a single bullet at 10 AM and sets off to find it. That the piece neighbors another by Conaway featuring Old West pulp novels shot through with bullet holes centers his “test” in the mythology of the West. What about all of those bullets that fell wide of their targets, anyway? 1,000 stories of the one that got away? Untapped metallurgic resource? Its task-oriented nature with real risk of failure, is why “Trajectory” works. That the act has overtones of Nikki de Saint Phalle in her whites (Conaway wears white) shooting a rifle for art just makes it more interesting as really Conaway embraces both the macho act of firing a weapon and the traditionally (I’m sorry to say) female act of cleaning up after himself. That some beautiful images (see top still) are created is a bonus.
As Conaway explored the CLUI site and environs through the lens of the Old West, Charissa Niles focused on “reclaiming the line” of the defunct Nevada Northern Railway while Matt McCalmont played nuclear tourist.
“Untitled Assemblage,” Charissa Niles
“Untitled Assemblage,” Charissa Niles
“Untitled Assemblages,” Charissa Niles
Niles came away from the desert with a series of spare, elegant untitled assemblages made, it seems, from found wood and metal fragments from the site, and a scale railway created from rusting junk and weathered wood. Particularly because we know the provenance of the assemblage elements, related as they are to the failed railway, the pieces function as shorthand for what we build, how we fail, what we leave behind. Ghost towns and ghost railways remind that much as progress is often seen as an ever-ascending line graphed through time, the reality is more complex.
McCalmont rode a ‘76 Honda Trail dirtbike from the Nevada Test Site tracing the path of nuclear fallout, and heading for Wendover, Utah where CLUI is located. He recorded brief notes about his solo journey that are included in the exhibition notes, but the work that results is far less pedestrian: a series of reliefs, sculptures, drawings, impressions of landscape. His strongest is a masterful concrete floor-piece, “Untitled-Disk” that functions as a kind of mashup between a Smithson on-site and an Andre on-the-floor.
Your opportunity to see this worthwhile exhibition is limited, but it’s highly recommended that you make the trek. Out of Place is only up through March 28 (this Saturday) and Disjecta’s hours are Friday through Sunday from 12-5.
POSTED: March 23rd, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, brennan connaway, charissa niles, disjecta, matt mccalmont, nowhere, visual art | No Comments »