Days before the new decade began I took a short trip with my 9 year old daughter to Las Vegas NV. For most of us Las Vegas trips include the typical stream of debauchery, financial jeopardy, binges on unlimited king crab legs, 1,000's of menthols, roller coasters, porn, Mignon's (fillet and otherwise), drugs, lies, and spinning out-of-control. With this journey and the company I kept while there, it was distinctly altered from that well known course of decline. I had a 9 year old with me, we were seeing my old friend Ezra Fowler and his wife Kelly, both had recently migrated from Portland Oregon and both of who had transported to Las Vegas with all of their Portland sensibilities firmly intact.

These parameters of a subdued Las Vegas produced a most interesting and valuable chain of events that lead me to discover one of the finest art shows I have seen in years. My only regret is that all I had was my iPhone to photograph with...it worked okay. This is a good one to check out. Well done Las Vegas, your shimmer is a new one for me. The show is likely no longer up, but I expect it illustrates the promise that the group at the Neon Museum and the Reed Whipple Cultural Center are moving Las Vegas forward with.

Altered States - Artists Re-imagine the Book - curated by Joseph Shuldiner. 

The gist of the show is that several artists took books "as there point of departure" from electronic information. I am aware of the irony of this being on the Jux blog, but for the purpose of this post, let it slide. I am going to go through this first with the artists bio and then the work. I hope I give credit appropriately. The individual pieces were all equally tantalizing and puzzling and as a curated whole they were doubly empowered. I also suspect it was the sheer silence of the room and the fact I was in there with no supervision and just my daughter and comrade Ezra that completed the heaviness of the show. I know my mind carried more than a few pieces away.

Jill Sylvia

To see these and know their fine exact edges gives these pieces special impact for me. What you see is an exercise in repetition and volume and for me beautiful stunning anxiety. 

Guy Laramee

These forced me to walk around and examine them. As if a colony of artist termites endowed with the spirit of a long lost Chinese dynasty had come upon an ancient library with hunger and visions of home.

Doug Beube

It was the phone book that I liked. The use of a directory so misshapen that its destiny in life has been supplanted by a new more important crusade; simple beauty, non-essential design. The converse of its genesis.

Jessica Holada

These were my daughters immediate favorites. She understood in seconds that she was seeing the text books of her childhood re-imagined and re-engineered into something much more. Their is a deep cleverness to these pieces and they are hands-on, which was a missing truth in the show - books, by design are for the hands, and to the eye and then into the brain. This was the single part of the show where the audience was able to be with books, and not merely seeing how they have been adjusted under the artists notion.

This one had an audio portion that hooked my daughter for the hour or so we were there. What you see here is a world map but it has been "re-populated" with images of computers. I can't comment on the audio, but it made her laugh. 

Ellie Brown

You are just going to find these intoxicating. Books bound tight and told without text. At least that's how I read it.

Alexander Korzer-Robinson

These pieces reminded me of seeing the world with X-ray vision, a special kind of vision where the words atomize and the images are left. Alexander takes encyclopedias and cuts away all the words and leaves the images - in the order they are found and thus revealing an unseen layering that has always been there.. I'm guessing the letter H?

I am not able to attribute the photographs I took of the rest of the show, but here are a few more shots of the work. It proved to be a great departure from past experiments with Vegas. 

This is an atlas, re-imagined.

These are zippered together books and pages arranged in a circle, I took the photo looking down at them. 

This is a tapestry of books that greets you when you enter into the gallery. It is comprised wholly of books, paperbacks, and the following photo is the same tapestry but from the back, and I had my daughter walk in front to give it scale. Its big and took dedication to create. Sorry I didn't catch the artists name.

You can see the figure of my friend Ezra Fowler behind this, it too is big and was constructed from the spines of books, I suspect it is the same artist as the previous photo. 

And last - this is the building where the Neon Museum will be. It is a transplanted building but has come to be a beacon for that Mid-Century architecture Las Vegas was built on.  

I suppose one could say not everything stays in Las Vegas.