Kate Clark’s “Licking the Plate” sculpture is made from clay and a male kudu.
with some of the artists featured in Late Harvest, the main exhibit in the museum’s feature gallery that corresponds with the conference. The exhibit opened on Sept. 27 and will run until Jan. 18, 2015. Curated by NMA’s Joanne Northrup and Adam Duncan Harris of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Late Harvest features more than 30 artists. “This exhibition unites radically different modes of artistic production that share a common focus on animals,” writes Northrup. “Canonincal wildlife paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries are juxtaposed with contemporary art that incorporates taxidermy.” The start of the exhibit is flooded with light from Brigitte Zieger’s Shooting Wallpaper, a looping animated film in which an illustrated woman, camouflaged in toile wallpaper, makes shooting motions. After that, the exhibition darkens considerably, both in color
Attendees mingled around a horse fabricated out of horse hide, wax, wood and iron—a piece by Berlinde De Bruyckere.
The Nevada Museum of Art’s Art + Environment Conference attracted artists, critics, scientists and writers from around the world
T
ARTICLE & PHOTOS BY ASHLEY HENNEFER
he future is interdisciplinary, creating inextricable links among nature and technology, design and science. And so, too, is the past, but somewhere along the timeline of humanity, that connection seemed lost. Reclaiming and reembracing that overlap is the overarching message of this year’s Art + Environment Conference, a global event hosted at the Nevada Museum of Art.
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The conference occurs every three years; the first was held in 2008. The three-day conference is comprised of a featured exhibit and a series of talks hosted by visiting artists. “Themes of the exhibition are connected to the themes of the conference,” said David Walker, NMA executive director. According to the museum, these themes explore three relationships: that between human and animals,
between human and the world’s ecosystems, and between art and science. Walker notes the conference’s unique logo—the letters “a + e” are spelled out in furry typography as a way to indicate the conference’s emphasis on living creatures. In attendance were artists, critics, scientists and writers from around the world. On the opening night, attendees were given a chance to mingle
and in tone. Several of the walls are painted in dark shades of red and green—evoking colors of blood and earth, made especially clear by the art paired with it. Although much of the show’s work is by contemporary artists, several pieces harken back to more classical styles of art. This is evident through pieces such as Damien Hirst’s “The Kingdom of the Father,” a large installation comprised of real, preserved butterflies. The result is three cathedral window-shaped designs that, from a distance, look like stained glass. It’s striking and beautiful, and startling when the realization comes—that it’s made from dead insects. This kind of work has gotten Hirst into hot water before with animal rights activists; he’s used other animal parts for art pieces, and an installation at Tate Modern in 2012 resulted in more than 9,000 butterfly deaths when their captivity was the display itself, and was not a conducive
environment to their survival. But some argue that his art brings attention to the many animals killed regularly through other human activity. And yet it raises some questions—for a conference that explores concepts and encourages discussion about sustainability, does art that causes death of animals go against the point? In fact, the whole show might make animal lovers simultaneously upset and introspective. The abundance of taxidermy takes a bit of getting used to—like a log cabin filled with hunting trophies, it’s unnerving to stand in a museum and be surrounded by animal carcasses. But there’s also a bit of peace knowing that many of the bodies have been preserved in beautiful pieces of art, and were acquired after the animals had died of natural causes. Northrup addressed these ideas in the first talk of the conference, “Friend or Faux? Animals as Contemporary Art.”