Wide-Eyed and Dreaming: A Season of Seeing at the Nevada Museum of Art
by Rebecca Eckland, Nevada Museum of Art
This fall, experience what it’s like to be Wide-Eyed and Dreaming as the Nevada Museum of Art opens an exciting lineup of exhibitions that invite you to a “Season of Seeing in Four Acts.” Travel to a distant world, walk among “local warriors,” traverse the centuries with “Future Ancestral Technologies”, and explore the nature of memory itself through exhibitions that question, reflect, and imagine.
April Bey: Altantica, The Gilda Region
Sense-tingling, scintillating, and surreal: these adjectives only partly describe the universe created by contemporary artist April Bey in Atlantica, The Gilda Region. As you step into the portal—surrounded by plant foliage and magenta light— you’ll realize you’ve entered a chamber designed to slow time and transform space. You’re traveling to Atlantica, The Gilda Region a world where oppression and racism do not exist, and people of African descent are celebrated as visionaries and artists. Home to innovators and creators, Altantica embraces queerness, feminism, internet culture, and above all, joy.
Once you arrive in the exhibition, explore Atlantica’s lush, colorful tapestries, digitally woven blankets, and textiles mounted on wood and encased in resin that shimmer in the planet’s currency … glitter.
“Made in another universe that parallels, critiques, celebrates, and satirizes our own, Atlantica occupies exploited space, offering up a fictitious world where labels are nonexistent, and we are allowed to float within our self-defined identities,” said artist April Bey.
Guillermo Bert: The Journey
Guillermo Bert makes artworks that explore the endurance of immigrants who have left their home countries behind. Rooted in the artist’s personal story, Bert’s primary focus has been to explore the experiences of people and families who enter the United States along the Mexico-US border.
His artwork draws metaphorical relationships between the journeys of migrants, harsh and empty desert landscapes, and the objectification of American values. This mid-career survey includes a variety of traditional and contemporary media that are drawn from the entirety of Bert’s career, as well as new works produced exclusively for this exhibition.
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless
A multidisciplinary artist who is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent, Cannupa Hanska Luger creates monumental installations that are a part of his ongoing project, Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT), that explores Indigenous futures presented through a lens of speculative fiction. Luger gained national attention for his seminal Mirror Shield Project as a response to support Water Protectors fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota.
Speechless takes its inspiration from the historical phenomenon of the formation of cargo cults and features a large-scale speaker tower in order to ask us important questions: Who gets to speak? Who has to bite their tongue? Whose messages are muted? What meanings remain to be discovered? Luger asserts that the concept of the exhibition, “flips the Western gaze back on itself to reflect that in present-day North American culture, we are all in a cargo cult.”
Elisheva Biernoff: Reservoirs of Time
Biernoff’s intricately rendered paintings capture the enigmatic experiences of others while exploring the nature of memory. Painting, for her, is a way to see and understand the subject of a photograph, given she spends so much more time looking at the image than the person who took the original picture. About her work, Biernoff reflects, “I’m getting to spend time with someone who is absent. Absent because they’re unknown to me, because they’re far away, because wherever they are, they’re either an older version of the person in the photograph or no longer living.”
Step into a Season of Seeing
If you’re ready to experience the wonder of being wide-eyed and dreaming, there’s no better place to do it than the Nevada Museum of Art.
Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. You can upgrade your visit with a guided tour, free with admission, offered at 5 p.m. Thursdays, 2 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturdays, and 11 a.m. Sundays.