Notions of Erasure: United By Territory
Notions of Erasure: United by Territory featuring the 2023 Nevada Arts Council Visual Arts Fellows. This exhibition provides the opportunity to view selected works from 2023 Fellows: Jeffrey Burden, Glynn Cartledge, Gig Depio, Miya Hannan, Brent Holmes and Bobbie Ann Howell. Each artist created work independently from the other and with no intention of every appearing together; yet taken together, the exhibit reveals how an artist’s place, time and circumstances, create unexpected and unintended connections to world around them. The Nevada Arts Council Fellowship program was designed to recognize and encourage the pursuit of artistic excellence by providing financial support and awareness to outstanding Nevada artists.
Exhibit Introduction
I’d be hard pressed to find a single theme that connects every artwork in this show—and I think that’s to the show’s credit. Sometimes, in a show arranged around a theme, you can feel the artists struggling to fit their pet projects into the assigned box. For Notions of Erasure: United By Territory, instead, there’s a cross-section of a group of dedicated artists, united by a territory, each in dogged pursuit of their own obsessions. As a result, we get a more organic picture of some of the issues and images woven through the state of Nevada—issues and images that, unsurprisingly, have relevance and resonance far beyond our borders. And to say there isn’t a single overarching theme doesn’t mean there is a lack of connection between one artist and the next, or echoes that drift from one frame to another.
One echo is an engagement with erasure—both historical and pictorial. Brent Holmes retrieves the Black cowboys who helped shape the West, but were often excluded from the Hollywood fantasias of the Western (as well, he brings back totems of the African religions that were violently stripped from the Africans who were delivered to America across the Middle Passage). Miya Hannan’s work, featuring empty, eroded chairs, also evokes figures essential to the construction of the West, even as they were excluded from its bounties. These chairs are addressed to the Asian immigrant laborers who helped build out our infrastructure, including their crucial work on the transcontinental railroad—who were then denied land ownership, and forcibly driven out of their neighborhoods, after their work was done. The chairs, to me, stand as markers of exclusion—and suggest a sense of rest, endlessly deferred.
Gig Depio and Glynn Cartledge’s works are connected by a certain solidity in the way they paint the figure. Though each is referencing a different aesthetic tradition—in Depio’s case, WPA and post- revolutionary Mexican murals, and in Cartledge’s case, the paper dolls that can be overlaid with a variety of paper outfits—their subjects are forcefully rendered, and turn outward to present themselves to the viewer. Depio’s subjects are a combination of historical and fictional figures; Cartlidge’s subjects are formerly incarcerated people. Two distinct populations—but all seem to project a desire for recognition on their own terms, while at the same time being caught up in forces beyond their control. For Cartledge, that force is the carceral system—for Depio, the less explicitly barred cage of history.
The two artists whose work veers furthest towards a sense of abstraction are Jeffrey Burden and Bobbie Ann Howell—though that initial sense of formal abstraction is largely a feint. From a certain distance, you could take their work as pure exercises in composition and color. Burden’s work presents a fog of shades or tones—the picture plane as an alluring, dissolving mist. Howell, by contrast, works in sharply defined geometries, spinning radial forms in overlapping symmetries. When you step closer, though, you realize those forms—diffuse in Burden’s case, precise in Howell’s—are saturated with recognizable images. In Burden’s pieces, images are piled atop images, drawn in imitation of a multiple-exposure photograph. In Howell’s large-scale cut paper piece, the neatly arranged latticework is made up of human silhouettes, insects with splayed wings, and botanical details. And here, perhaps, you can arrive on a notion that applies to everything in the show—they provoke and reward the impulse of a double-take.
– Chris Lanier
Jeffrey Burden
2-Dimensional Visual Arts Fellow | Las Vegas, Nevada

Digital/Drawing
29.25″ x 34.5″ x 2″
2023

Graphite on Board
29.75″ x 24.5″ x 1.5″
2022
Glynn Cartledge
2-Dimensional Visual Arts Fellow | Reno, Nevada

Oil on Canvas
36″ x 26″ x 3.5″
2018

Fabric and Notions
36″ x 26″ x 3.5″
2004
Gig Depio
2-Dimensional Visual Arts Fellow | Las Vegas, Nevada

Oil on Panel
32″ x 32″ x 1.5″
2014

Acrylic on Canvas
36″ x 36″ x 2″
2024
Miya Hannan
3-Dimensional & New Media Visual Arts Fellow | Reno, Nevada

Soot on Paper
47.5″ x 34.75″ x 2.5″
2021

Used Chair, 38″ x 19″ x 23″ (original work)
Documentation/Print 45″ x 30″ x .5″
2021
Brent Holmes
3-Dimensional & New Media Visual Arts Fellow | Las Vegas, Nevada

Archival Print
9.5″ x 16.5″ x .5″
2020

Ink on Paper
48″ x 35.5″ x 1.25″
2024
Bobbie Ann Howell
2-Dimensional Visual Arts Fellow | Las Vegas, Nevada

Cut Paper
5″ x 9.75″ x 1″
2007

Cut Paper (Lenox 100), Acrylic Paint
30″ x 22″ x 1″
2022
Staff & Technical Assistance
Artist Services Specialist / Art Installer
Stephen Reid
775.687.7108
sreid@nevadaculture.org