3-day art festival in desert near Beatty begins Friday

What we think of as the middle of nowhere isn’t — that’s the underlying message of a weekend-long art exhibit that dwells on the “diversity, biological and cultural,” of the desert. The 2021 “Bullfrog Biennial” features more than 20 selected artists, most local but some from California and as far away as Chicago; their work will be shown in a facility just outside Beatty Friday through Sunday. Not coincidentally, that coincides with the town’s Beatty Days festival.

The exhibit site is the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Red Barn Cultural Center, adjacent to the Rhyolite ghost town and famous for its outdoor sculpture park, particularly the ghostly riff on the Last Supper by the late artist Albert Szukalski. But it’s the larger surrounding site that’s more pertinent to the artwork.

“The sensibility is real desert art by real desert people,” says artist Brent Holmes, a co-curator. “It’s about ‘sense of place.’ You’ve got to go there to be there.” The work, heavy on contributions by women and artists of color, challenges the mostly white provenance of the state’s Land Art inventory, he adds, and poses fundamental questions: “What does it mean to be a body in space? What is wilderness? What is civilization.”

In addition to physical works, the event will feature performance art, as well as, on Saturday evening, several bands, including The Implosions. For more information, go to goldwellmuseum.org

For his submission, artist and filmmaker Shahab Zargari homed in on the reflective markers and roadside signage on the drive up to Goldwell. “Mile markers, safety signs, and the like,” he says. “And it got me thinking about inanimate man-made objects in the desert that inform us of the landscape, and what they mean to the humans who encounter them.”

So he took photos of details around Goldwell and in the ruins of Rhyolite, had three of the images printed on diamond-shaped pieces of aluminum, and mounted them on metal posts with concrete bases: “landscape as an installation,” he says.

“Depending on the time of day viewers interact with the signs, (they) will deliver unique experiences while at the same time acting like a sort of treasure hunt for attendees to see if they can find the items portrayed on each sign.”

Jw Caldwell’s painting depicts a purple cowboy being bucked off of a triceratops — familiar themes for this longtime Las Vegas artist — backgrounded by a star-filled desert sky. The word “done” bisects the middle, the letters made from the same dark sky.

More than a witty crosswiring of Nevada mythologies — from the state’s cowboy heritage to its deep-time paleontology — the painting “was a bit of an exploration of the word ‘done,’” Caldwell says. From things he thought he was done with, thanks to changes during the pandemic, changes in his artistic practice or the upheavals of recent years: “Maybe I was reflecting on all the changes in the past couple years; thoughts, people, situations that I was ‘done’ with.” Maybe the triceratops is done with having a cowboy on his back.

It’s also a sequel of sorts to his contribution to the 2019 “Bullfrog Biennial,” a painting of a cowboy peacefully riding a triceratops through the desert with the word “Splendid” arching overhead. “I can’t say for sure if I’ve painted the same cowboy riding the same triceratops,” Caldwell says, “but clearly the sentiment has changed.” No kidding: “Sometimes when people ask me how I’m doing, I simply say ‘I’m done.’”

You might think Nanda Sharif-pour’s artwork “Outdoor” looks like a simple terrarium, and you’d be half-right. It is basically a terrarium. The glass box is filled with soil, rocks, plant life, pieces of wood and more from the desert around Goldwell. But its intent is more complex. “I want to bring the outdoors inside the gallery,” she says.

The idea is to allow viewers to see the desert more clearly. Outside, where you see the whole environment in one vast sweep, “you get kind of insensitive to it,” the Las Vegas artist says — the desert’s granular character gets lost in its overscaled grandeur. But excerpted in a gallery setting, a manageably small patch of desert reveals itself. “You are seeing how beautiful it is,” Sharifpour says. “It’s a staged experience.”

She’s added a grow light for the plants in her piece, and the futility of that bulb’s attempt to mimic the sun leads into the work’s pandemic subtext, the way many of us were ensconced indoors with only facsimiles of our “outside” lives to comfort us.

Asked whether people will drive the two hours from Las Vegas to see such works, Holmes was philosophical. He hopes so. Los Angelenos drive into the California outback to see the “Desert X” installations, he said; Las Vegans had just waited hours to leave the parking lot at Electric Daisy Carnival. Anyway, it’s still worth doing.

“I want to bring more fine art to rural Nevada,” he says. “These places deserve it.”