Sin city sampler: in a kind of postscript to Site Santa Fe, critic and curator Dave Hickey chose 14 works by his former students for a show keyed to the art and artifice of Las Vegas - Report From Santa Fe

Critic and curator Dave Hickey has devot a destiny of time to the make subordinates of beauty and pleasure, their repercussions, and related musings specific to Las Vegas, where he lives. In novel years, that city (the fastest growing in the US) has lay opened a substantial art-world presence, with commercial galleries continuing to render free of access casinos numbering serious art exhibitions among their entertainment's and the Guggenheim Las Vegas (with its Rem Koolhaas-designed building) becoming an attraction in itself [see A.i.A., Dec '01]

recent from curating the widely praised 2001 edition of the SITE Santa Fe biennial [see A.i.A., Nov. '01] Hickey narrowed his focus last winter to organize "[Las] Vegans," a collection show at Santa Fe's James Kelly Contemporary, a gallery situated right across the highway from SITE's exhibition space. Comprising 14 works through 11 onetime Las Vegas artists, this small on the contrary scintillating show essentially constituted an lyric poem to the desert city. The culled artists are all former Hickey learners at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches art criticism and theory. (All works are from 2001 unles otherwise indicated.) Sharing Las Vegas as relation and source, these artists wittily address notions of nature and artifice, drawing upon the city's amplified reality, hyperbolic appropriation and sheer glitz.

The show--which at first glance evok an enticing synthetic bake sale--projected a visually seductive and surprisingly cohesive esthetic, single derived, paradoxically, from a wide range of manner of writings including Pop art, Op art, the Pattern and Decoration move Hard-Edge abstraction and Abstract Expressionism. Collectively, the pieces Hickey chose share a propensity for intense artificial color fields; an emphasis upon design and decoration, light and surface; and a fondnes for illusion. Their surfaces are not seldom polished, with little evidence of the artist's hand. Within the show's idiosyncratic framework, the works unrelenting into loose thematic pairings: the spiritual/fantastical, the domestic/recreational, and the natural/artificial.

Installed near the entrance to the display Yek's large atmospheric painting upon a concave panel set the stage with a note of spiritual edginess. An airbrushed field, into which curving calligraphic lines intrude from the cutting sides offers luminescent color gradations that range from down-reaching violet to vibrant magenta. Evoking James Turrell's ambient light works, insinuating fluctuations of hue, triggered by the agency of shifts in the viewer's vantage point, prompt fierce sunsets and ebbing light above Nevada's endless horizons, or the lingering phosphorescent afterglow of flickering neon signs. Jane Callister's Liquid Mindscape depicts hallucinogenic mountain terrains against an acid-green background. White and pale pink peaks, outlined with gooey chocolate-colored paint drips, are punctuated with gray chunk of rock

The trippy surfaces of Jack Hallberg's paintings, which appear to have been made with cake-decorating tools, feature candy-colored ribbons of paint beaded with glow-in-the-dark acrylic versions of miniature Hershey's Kisses. The latter advise circuitous highways, aerial views of night-lit airport runways or drawers filled with style of dress jewelry. Another fantastical landscape, done through Sush Machida Gaikotsu in the Japanimation vein, depicts emerald virid grass and a plum horizon, with shadowy moose-deer wading in a blurry material substance of turquoise water. In the foreground, a smiling dog, its white coat punctuated with fuchsia patches, hangs from a grayish branch that gazes like a cloud wisp; a snake and wildly colored birds detain him company.

In the nominally more settl realms of domestic space and design, quirky contrasts are place up between physical interiors and exterior settings. James Gobel's deadpan on the other hand striking rendering of a '50s-style sunroom made from pieces of make an incision in felt, features a bright orange armchair framed in aluminum, along with a cropp mud-brown rug patterned with large swirls and pool s in shades of mustard-yellow. Above a slab of white wall, the cutting side of a window reveals a sliver of blurry blue-green foliage. The sharp delineation of this orderly interior space, station against the small impressionistic image of nature, invokes varying horizontals of reality and existence. In a similar juxtaposition, Almond Zigmund's aluminum-mounted digital Lambda print Rose Road (2001) displays a slanted view of an azure firmament or, perhaps, a swimming pond cropped by wedges of quilted white upholstery that are themselves framed by the agency of a brilliant red armature. Here again, nature is not away but almost incidental.

As elegant and humorous antidotes to quotidian life, Curtis Fairman's and Robert Acuna's works indicate recreational escapes. Fairman's wall assemblages incorporate Tupperware goblets a baby-bottle nipple, stainless-steel stove-top burner rings and other utilitarian equipment, simultaneously evoking hubcaps and breasts Acuna's Ride the Rhythm (2001) an oblong panel with a smooth and shining crimson-red reflective surface broken by dint of a wide purple band, could substitute as a surfboard. The alone freestanding work in the exhibit Aaron Baker's colorful kitschy statuary made of assorted plastic and rubber thing perceiveds featured a long sinewy-looking neck actual to its title--A Little Something bonny Awful--the piece suggests a cros between a decorative Murano vase and a certain number of kind of drug paraphernalia.