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Monday, November 01, 2010

Contemporary Arts Center Presents - “I Hope You’re Feeling Better”


The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) is pleased to present “I Hope You’re Feeling Better”, a collaborative art project featuring work by eighteen Las Vegas writers and visual artists. The show runs November 3, 2010 through January 7, 2011. The exhibition events are supported through funding from the Vegas Valley Book Festival and Nevada Humanities. More information and downloads can be found at www.ihopeyourefeelingbetter.com

What: As a part of the Vegas Valley Book Festival, “I Hope You’re Feeling Better” explores the concept of collaborative art and the boundaries between the written and visual art. The project connected eighteen writers and visual artists, asking them to consider each other’s work and influences. Collaborators then began creating together in self selected groups. The result is a wide variety of work, from traditional ekphrastic pieces of illustrated writing to large installations that explore questions of contemporary society and art.
As artists attempt to navigate experience through object, image and word, collaboration between writers and visual artists has long been a critical basis for expression and understanding. Curators Andreana Donahue and Kathryn Kruse ask both participants and audience to experience art as dialogue between disciplines. In “I Hope You’re Feeling Better” artists and writers explore the potential of language through collaboration as methodology, often straying from their normal practices to discover innovations in their work.

Who: Stephen Hendee, Brent Sommerhauser, Lindsay Berg, John Bissonette, Andreana Donahue, Shannon Eakins, Jennifer Henry, Kathryn Kruse, Jarret Keene, Erica Anzalone, Sarah Kokernot, Juan Martinez,, Andy Nicholson, Alissa Nutting, Ashley Siebels, Christopher Seelie, Oscar Oswald, and Veronica Villalobos

Where: Contemporary Arts Center, 107 East Charleston Boulevard, Suite 120, Las Vegas, NV 89104

When: November 3, 2010 to January 7, 2011 – Exhibit
November 4, 2010 5:30-9 PM - Opening Reception. Presentation beginning at 6 PM. Poet Dr. Don Revell will speak on the history of collaborative art followed by discussions and readings by artists.
Performance: visual/sound artist Stephen Hendee & writer Jarret Keene 7pm.
November 5, 2010 6-10 PM - First Friday. A reading by the Bike Bards in conjunction with My Wheel in the Dark: A Night Ride with Las Vegas Bike & Bus Bards will happen at 7:30pm
November 6, time TBA – Performance and reading at the Fifth Street School at 12:45 and 2pm.

About the Artists:
Stephen Hendee has had substantial exhibition projects through PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, The New Museum, Sculpture Center, The Whitney Museum Of American Art, all in NYC. National exhibitions include: The Smart Museum, Chicago, The St Louis Museum, St. Louis, MO; The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; SECCA, Winston Salem, NC, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston; Henry Urbach Architecture NYC; ACE Gallery, NYC; Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, OH. He has received a Luis Comfort Tiffany Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, an Elizabeth Foundation Grant, the Kirin Contemporary Art Award in Japan, and a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship and has been awarded residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation in 1997 and the Headland Center for the Arts in 2001. Recent awards include a 2007 Nevada Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship and a residency at the MacDowell Colony in 2008. He recently produced work at the Goldwell Open Air Museum Red Barn residency in April 2010 that was exhibited at UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History, August 27 to october 25 2010.

Brent Sommerhauser (b. 1973 Winfield, KS) has exhibited his sculpture and drawings nationally and internationally. Notably, his work was included in the 2004 Windsor Biennial (Winsdor, Ontario) and was selected for New Glass Review 26, featuring innovative works in glass worldwide. Brent holds a BS in Psychology and a BFA from Emporia State University and received his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has taught art at The Glass Furnace (Istanbul), Hastings College, The Kansas City Art Institute, The Ohio State University, Pilchuck Glass School, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and chaired the glass program at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies. He lives and works in Las Vegas and was a recent recipient of a Cirque du Soleil Community Support Grant for the Visual & Performing Arts.

Conflating the techniques and imagery of overtly sentimental, lowbrow fine art reproduction with decidedly high-end techniques of painting and ink-jet printing on canvas, John Bissonette's work juxtaposes the very notion of 'high' and 'low.' In an homage to the glossy and the programmatic, Bissonette invites the viewer to search for deeper meaning in the common language of culture in art that transcends mere cliche and iconography. Working within the constraints of mass culture, he recodes appropriated images and text to allow for meaning to be born in the slippery spaces between the genuine and the prescribed. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bissonette was a recipient of the Herman E. Spivy Fellowship from the University of Tennessee, where he earned his MFA in 2006. In 2008, he was a recipient of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts' Residency Fellowship and his work will be featured in the upcoming West edition of New American Paintings. When not exhibiting his work nationally, he is a lecturer at his alma mater.

Andreana Donahue (b. 1981 Chicago, IL) is an artist/curator living and working in Las Vegas. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003, and also studied at Temple University in Rome, Italy. Donahue owned/curated main gallery from 2007-2009, an exhibition space that featured contemporary, emerging and mid-career artists. Having returned to studio practice, she is currently exploring the impermanence of place and displacement from /reconnection to the land through hand-cut paper installations. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, Rome (Italy), and Las Vegas, with an upcoming solo exhibition at the Winchester Cultural Center (Las Vegas) in January 2011.

Shannon Eakins is pursuing a MFA from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Previously in Tacoma, she worked as an educator, glassblower, and dog trainer. Her recent projects address mammalian behavioral models, fear-based targets, and our shared, societal distance to nature.

Jennifer Henry earned a Bachelor degree in English from UNLV in 2002. She is the owner of Flockflockflock inside Emergency Arts and a current First Friday Advisory/Board Member. She was the arts and entertainment writer for: Las Vegas Weekly, Citylife, 944 Las Vegas, Racket Magazine, LVM, Showbiz, M Lifestyle 2005-2009, Editor of the First Friday Newsletter 2007-2008, First Friday Outdoor Exhibition Spaces Curator 2007-2008, and co-owner/exhibiting artist at capital h gallery inside The Arts Factory 2003-2007. Henry has contributed Lola works to a variety of charity arts events including: First Friday Annual Fundraiser 6 & 7, Opportunity Village benefit collaborative works show at the CAC, Art n' Sole 2010.

Lindsay Berg is an aspiring young writer and painter with interests which span massage to India and Religious Studies; she is also keen on Classical Music and yoga. She occasionally teaches art to young kids with a local art studio, swims, gardens, and studies massage.

Jarret Keene is author of the poetry collections Monster Fashion and A Boy's Guide to Arson and the unauthorized rock band bio The Killers: Destiny Is Calling Me. He has edited several books, including The Underground Guide to Las Vegas, Las Vegas Noir, and Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas. His primitive nuclear doom metal band, also called Dead Neon, terrorizes local dive bars.

Erica Anzalone is currently a Schaeffer fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She comes to UNLV from Drake University, where she taught literature and creative writing as a visiting professor from 2006 until 2009. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Sentence, Cream City Review, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. Her manuscript Samsara has been a semi-finalist at Ahsahta and Elixir Press, and she hopes to publish it soon.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where she served as Editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB, the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and many other journals. She is the author of the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (Starcherone, October 2010). Alissa is currently a PhD candidate at UNLV, where she has received Cobain and Schaeffer Fellowships in Fiction. She is fiction editor of the literary journal Witness and managing editor of Fairy Tale Review.

Sarah Kokernot was born in Kentucky and moved to Las Vegas from Austin, Texas. Her story "The Russians Have Come", is forthcoming in the February 2011 issue of PANK magazine.

Kathryn Kruse is working towards her MFA at UNLV’s Creative Writing program. She has lived on four continents and is pleased to find herself in Las Vegas but still considers Chicago home.

Juan Martinez is a doctoral candidate in literature at UNLV. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Redivider, West Branch, River Teeth, The Morning News, The Santa Monica Review, Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere.

Andy Nicholson's poetry has been published in magazines and journals including Shampoo, Moria, Interim, Beeswax, The Offending Adam, Aught, and Cannot Exist. He is a former poetry editor for Oranges & Sardines. He received his MFA from California College of the Arts and is working on his PhD at The University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Oscar Oswald is an MFA student enrolled in UNLV's Creative Writing program. Currently, his work as a poet owes its origins to four years of improv theater and a recent obsession with the void. He is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Christopher Seelie is a writer and sometimes editor. He is never a visual artist but not for lack of desire.

Ashley Siebels is a writer turned visual artist, visual artist turned writer living and working in Las Vegas.

Veronica Villalobos is from Los Angeles. She is currently studying creative writing in the MFA program at UNLV.

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Contemporary Arts Center
107 E. Charleston Suite 120
Las Vegas NV 89104
info@lasvegascac.org
lasvegascac.org
702-382-3886

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12-5 or by appointment.
First Friday 6-10

The Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit 501(c)3 art organization dedicated to presenting new, high quality, visual, and performing art, while striving to build, educate, and sustain audiences for contemporary art. The CAC strives to provide a place where artists can learn about best practices, test new ideas in the public arena, and connect with fellow artists within and beyond our own community.

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