Las Vegas artist Nella Clersaint has been thinking about the artwork that was in our Window Gallery in early 2025, Gabriella Rodriguez’s AL AMANECER. She writes—
Gabriella Rodriguez’s AL AMANECER is a mixed-media painting, mostly oil on canvas, but with elements of painted felt, and airbrush on fabric. Its background is made up of three gradient color fields. In the upper right corner, “Al Amanecer,” which means “At Sunrise” in Spanish, is written in the style of a graffiti tag. Just below that, there is a figure holding balloons, and below that figure is another, who is pushing a vending cart. In the upper left portion of the painting, which is backed by a yellow and pink gradient, we see three conversing figures airbrushed onto fabric. The backs of their shirts are printed with the infamous Las Vegas area code: 702. Above them is a chile, and at the very top left corner is the sun, drawn with a face that seems to watch over the entire painting.
In my opinion, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s Window Gallery, where I saw Rodriguez’s work, is criminally underrated. In fact, I feel so passionate about it that in an alternate universe, all art is now displayed that way, interactive with a pertinent (or even sometimes discordant) environment/landscape. For this artwork, I believe the location was perfect. The background of the display area was painted a sky blue in positive contrast to the brown of the museum’s building and the desert plants in the Donald H. Baepler Xeric Garden nearby. It positioned the painting in conversation with the Las Vegas Valley landscape, dominated by the blue sky and earth tones. The forms in the painting are nearly independent in space, there is little sense of usual gravity, but they still interact. Everything is almost suspended. Vegas’ cityscape is like that as well, both the overstimulation of the Strip, which can make life seem unreal, and the nature of a sprawling city in the middle of vast “empty.”
Interacting with this piece came at an interesting time for me. I had recently returned to Las Vegas after studying in New York. Before leaving, I found that in attempting to understand my own work (and maybe life), I became somewhat obsessed with trying to identify how growing up in Las Vegas impacted my thoughts, and how I visually represented them. I had been thinking about trends in the current artwork being produced by Millennial and Gen Z artists like myself and Gabriella Rodriguez: I find that many are drawn to a multifaceted approach that resembles sampling culture, akin to what we see in her work. Some of my favorite examples of contemporary “sample paintings” were created by Francisce G. Pinzón Samper (b. 1997, in Colombia but practicing in Paris) and Issy Wood (b. 1993, in the U.S. but practicing in England).
Sampling is an important part of the way we work, like how in music people can shift an element of an existing song to create an entirely new song. We are bombarded with online images almost every day, and it is nearly impossible to think without referencing these “bites.” So much of our world is now digital. Digital things can seem as if they’ve come out of thin air, not often leaving traces of their physicality, though they are reliant on physical things to keep running. We are more intercultural than ever before, and must make all of our different ways of being work together.
When I think about artworks that are part of sampling culture, like AL AMANECER, it seems to me as though we are attempting to bridge a gap between the harshness of those digital impositions, and the less exact, more visceral, sometimes illogical, and emotional aspects of being human, creating a world where these opposite things exist together. Las Vegas is special in that sense, because the mere “design” of the city draws attention to these paradoxes as well. Las Vegas artists who approach work this way, like Gabriella, are very important voices.
Image: Gabriella Rodriguez, AL AMANECER (detail), 2024, Air brush, oil paint, fabric. Photo courtesy Krystal Ramirez.