Springs Preserve art exhibit examines line between city, desert

Round and round she walks, and where she stops to check her hand-held GPS, collect discarded knickknacks, absorb the parched scenery, sidestep desert critters, scoop up soil samples, snap photos, create interpretive maps and consult her artistic muse all around the outskirts of Las Vegas ... nobody knows.

"I base my paintings on a sense of presence in different places," says artist Emily Silver. "When I first came to Las Vegas, I kept noticing that every time it would go farther west. It would expand by a half-mile block every time. I would park on Charleston (Boulevard) and walk up to the new edge. I had a fantasy to walk the whole periphery of Las Vegas."

So explains "Periphery," the latest exhibit at Springs Preserve's Big Springs Gallery through mid-January, spotlighting Silver's watercolors examining the dividing line where the urban landscape of Las Vegas ends and the as-yet-untouched desert begins.

"She was going to walk the whole way, then she did the Google map and she realized it would be over a hundred miles and that might be a little much, so she picked points that fall equally around the edge of Las Vegas," says Springs Preserve assistant curator Sarah Nucci.

"Our museum is supposed to help teach about the culture, but also about sustainability, the fact that we can't keep spreading out," Nucci adds. "This artwork does stir that in a kind of cool and different and more subtle way."

Eagerly embracing the project, Silver conducted her artistic reconnaissance missions over six months before the exhibit's opening earlier this fall.

Burning significant shoe leather, she might very well have suffered (calluses and fallen arches) for her art, having canvassed the outline of the local region in 10 seven-mile walks that looped her around I-215 and Blue Diamond Road, Boulder City and Henderson, North Las Vegas and Las Vegas Boulevard.

Result: Paintings created specifically for Springs Preserve that could be described as maps transformed into abstract art. Gridlike pieces represent the scope of each walk in a vivid palette of yellow, mauve, red, green, brown and orange, while conveying a sense of geography, erosion, sedimentation and topography.

One gallery panel describes Silver's work as a visual conversation between people and the landscape.

"You have these very factual things," Silver says. "But then you have the ephemeral things, the emotional, the spiritual sense, light and shadow."

Though a Northern California resident, Silver is a frequent Nevada visitor fascinated by the notion of boundaries between the natural and the man-made, one much better explored here than in her home state.

"I lived so long in the Bay Area and one city just morphs into another and you can never find an edge unless you see a sign," Silver says.

"Here it's a very dynamic moment where things change from being affected by humans to being unaffected, where pavement ends and there's the texture of the desert. It's like alien territory that we're uncomfortable in, we haven't made it ours yet."

Descended from geologists who helped map out the West, Silver gathered samples of soil on her contemplative strolls around the rim of town.

"Since 1995, I've been painting with soil, which is what paint was originally," Silver says. "I'm just making it more site-specific in my paintings. I collect it the same way my father did, and it's taking a little bit of Nevada home to my studio and I can stick my nose in it and it smells like the desert."

"Periphery" also marks something of a departure for the Big Springs Gallery, which has hosted exhibits focusing on realistic photographic and artistic depictions of nature's local wonders.

More impressionistic in approach, Silver's paintings could surprise some Springs Preserve visitors.

"It's so different from anything else we've shown here and we aimed with this one to meet that middle ground between fine art and nature," Nucci says.

"One of our senior engineers came over to see this exhibit and he was really surprised. He said, 'I liked it more than I thought I would.' When you find out what it is and see all the different layers of it, it's inspiring."

Ironically, speaking in terms of artistic vision, there is nothing peripheral about "Periphery."

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.