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Thanks to you, our community used 20 billion gallons less water last year than in 2002. You’ve removed 125 million square feet of grass and followed watering schedules and restrictions to do your part in surviving the worst drought in our region’s history. For our part, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has banked more than 500 billion gallons of water in reserve for our not-so-rainy days. SNWA is also working to access a portion of Nevada’s unused groundwater to supplement our supplies from the drought-stricken Colorado River. Our job is to protect the reliability of your water supply. We couldn’t do it without you. For more information about water conservation and the SNWA’s efforts to ensure our community’s sustainability, visit snwa.com.
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of a certain cosmic phenomenon—like the reverse acceleration that will someday accompany the heat-death of our universe—even though such a reference may be too obscure for the viewer. When told that the Hadron Collider was in the painting that rocked her world, Walsh replies, “I don’t even know what that is.” “His use of hard science to cocktail up his paintings is really fascinating, and he gets really passionate about that stuff,” Burns says. “But sometimes I’ll ask him, ‘Aren’t we allowed to just enjoy them?’” Porray knows that, “in the end, what I have is a painting [that] has to go out into the world and do the sorts of things that paintings do.” What he hopes Speed Racer, quantum physics, supercolliders and tunnels really add up to is “visual excitement.” So when New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who had popped in for a studio visit while in town to speak at UNLV, referred to Porray’s work as “zippy abstracts,” the artist was quite pleased. That was last year, and his art has progressed to where, as Walsh puts it, he “takes the figurative to the very edge of abstraction.” While the Vegas-style spectacle of colors gets the viewer’s attention, what holds it is that “they know something’s there but they’re not sure what it is.” Then the vaguely familiar elements form a new, bigger picture, which offers more to think about. And if he succeeds in enhancing the zippiness—the motion or acceleration, that is—you get the feeling that he’ll have really found something. Burns would call that the right mix of frosting and cake. This balance seems to be what the homestretch of Porray’s MFA pursuit is about: experimentation and discovery, combining his obscure references to see what looks good and hits a certain depth—all the while sharpening the many artist tools Walsh listed. “In some ways these are still school paintings,” Burns says, “where he’s working through a number of formal issues and making sure his skills are at a peak level. But I tell him, ‘Once you’re free from school and it’s just you, the great paintings will come along.’” This is where perhaps Porray’s leading virtue—understanding his place in time—comes in handy. “I’m in a luxury situation right now where I can just work,” he says. “I don’t have to force an evolution. Whatever it is, it’s going to shift naturally, starting with me making 25 paintings this summer.” DC