Preservation

The UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art presents Preservation, a group exhibition exploring aspects of preservation–of land, legacies, histories, and the biological. It will be on view at the Barrick Museum from 9/29/17–1/20/18, and in Grant Hall Gallery from 9/29- 10/26/17, in conjunction with the Museum’s 50th anniversary and the University’s 60th anniversary. Preservation includes international contemporary artists Adam Bateman, Laurie Brown, Moritz Fehr, Cayetano Ferrer, Brigid McCaffrey with Elizabeth Knafo, Ian James, Candice Lin, Ocean Earth, Marina Pinsky, and Max Hooper Schneider, and is curated by Aurora Tang. This project is funded in part by a grant from the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support is provided by Unforgettable Coatings and Global Art Transport.

Adam Bateman’s work is an investigation of the romanticization of the American West, exploring regional concerns about landscape, scale, and tourism in the West as a ritualization of Manifest Destiny, and the Sublime. Since the 1970s Laurie Brown has photographed the margins of our manmade landscapes, contributing an important female voice to the New Topographics approach to landscape photography. Her photographs seek a visual connection and dialogue between the present and past in human history and our cultural ties to the land, and prompt us to consider the future. Moritz Fehr works in sound, experimental film, and photography to create immersive installations. Colosseum is a stereoscopic 3D film that uses image and sound to transport the viewer to a former open pit gold and copper mine, pulling the viewer into its spiral. Ocean Earth is a development corporation invented for a group of artists, co-founded in 1980 by artist Peter Fend, a key figure working at the intersection of art and ecosystems. Cayetano Ferrer’s sculptural and multimedia works are examinations into perception and presentation, meticulous studies into the history, form, materiality, and meaning of architectural structures. Ian James uses photography and sculpture to explore questions concerning capitalism, spiritualism, technology, geologic time, and posthumanism. Candice Lin makes work that draws from forgotten histories, considering alternate narratives to our inherited ideas around race, gender, and human exceptionalism. Brigid McCaffrey is a filmmaker whose work focuses on environments in states of flux and precarity. Preservation features a new video by McCaffrey, with filmmaker Elizabeth Knafo. Marina Pinsky works between photography and sculpture, examining sites where the technological is imposed on the biological. Gala Porras-Kim’s work reconsiders museological methodologies of preservation and conservation, and the ways in which an object’s treatment, display, and modes of representation can affect its value and meaning. Max Hooper Schneider creates new ecosystems, biological constructs that complicate the relationship between the artificial and the natural, past and future, growth and decay. Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher, with a focus on contemporary place-based practices. Since 2009 she has been Program Manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Fall 2017 Exhibition Announcement