Sunrise Mountain serves as inspiration for art installation
When artist David Sanchez Burr moved to Las Vegas six years ago he sought out a patch of desert he could study and explore. He found the stretch of land between Sunrise and Frenchman mountains and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
“I wanted a place that wouldn’t take me too long to get to, and I wanted to study the area repeatedly,” Burr said. “I wanted to go back to a specific area and see what changes occur and what people do there.”
The exploration and study of that land is the inspiration for “Beyond Sunrise Mountain,” an art installation scheduled to be on display through March 22 at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery, 500 S. Grand Central Parkway.
Burr studied and contemplated the area and used it to reflect on larger themes and meanings. His installations are designed to be discovered by others who came to the desert for reflection and recreation.
“The West is known in the art world as a place where there is land art,” Burr said, citing the huge earthen artworks by Robert Smithson, who created the “Spiral Jetty” in the Great Salt Lake, and Michael Heizer, who created great trenches in the hills east of Overton to create “Double Negative,” one of the earliest examples of land art. “I have the idea that you don’t have to make enormous art to make an impact in a large place.”
In “Beyond Sunrise Mountain,” Burr brings the ideas he refined in the wild into the enclosed space of the government center where anyone can see it. The work covers a wide range of his reactions to the area.
In “Beyond Sunrise Mountain” he explores the valley’s love of spectacle.
“It’s a perpetual performance,” Burr said. “There are two stages that oppose one another. If you walk through it, through the curtained area and to the other side, you’ve stepped on one stage just to end up in a different stage on the other side.”
It’s unusual for an art show to change over the course of an exhibition, but some of the pieces in “Beyond Sunrise Mountain” are designed to be an ever-changing study in carefully engineered entropy.
“It was a fun show to put in because the art is in part an exploration of failure,” said Darren Johnson, the new curator for the Rotunda Gallery and the Winchester Cultural Center Gallery. “He is trying to create controlled failure and looking for the pieces to fall apart gradually.”
A prime example is “Slowly Revealing Searchlights at Sunrise,” which consists of a large panel over a wooden box. The surface of the panel is encrusted with a thick layer of earth.
“The earth on the panel is falling off little by little,” Burr said. “It’s about the transformation of the landscape. It’s evolving all around us.”
“Retractable Frontier Border and Horizon” looks at boundaries and limitations. Long spools of heavy nylon ribbon are labeled Frontier, Horizon and Border.
“The idea of the frontier is what brought a lot of people to the West,” Burr said. “It was manifest destiny. It was the endless unlimited land that brought people from the East to the West. That promise kept people going until the land ran out.”
Burr said the piece also reflected on the loss of the unknown.
“The horizon used to be something that was unknown,” Burr said. “There is no unknown anymore. We started mapping and putting down boundaries so that now, with Google Maps, everything is completely mapped and delineated to the square meter.”
An artist’s reception is scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. Feb. 27 with an artist talk and presentation at 6:30 p.m. Among the things expected during that presentation is the destruction of several pieces by sound, causing the carefully arranged gypsum crystal arrangements to implode.
For more information, visit clarkcountynv.gov.
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Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.
