Bovey Lee’s meticulously crafted paper-cut drawings explore the struggle between nature, urbanization, and the ownership of natural resources. Lee’s drawings are rooted in her study of Chinese calligraphy and pencil drawing, mediums in which she was immersed while growing up in Hong Kong.

Lee begins by sketching out her ideas by hand. She then devises a digital template made up of photographs, downloaded images, scans from magazines and books, and vector graphics. After her template is in place, she hand cuts the image with a knife onto a single sheet of Chinese rice paper.

The often airy and fragile, lace-like structures she creates contrast sharply with the themes of power, sacrifice, and survival underlying her work.

“Cutting paper is a visceral reaction and natural response to my affection for immediacy, detail, and subtlety,” Lee explains. “The physical demand from cutting is extreme and thrilling, slows me down and allows me to think clearly and decisively.”

Jean-Pierre Bonfort’s Travelling project is comprised of cellphone photographs taken during multiple trips over a five-year period from a moving train between Grenoble and Paris, France. The images do not appear in sequence, but instead are arranged by the artist to balance subject matter, light, and color. The work is thus not a record of the journey so much as of the artist’s state of mind.

Bonfort trained as a traditional landscape photographer, but in 2005 he began to use his cellphone’s camera as his primary tool. This modest appliance does not allow him to manipulate the image: to zoom, to change lenses, to choose shutter speeds, depth of field, or any of the thousands of options available on digital cameras. The cellphone camera limits his view of the world to a fixed wide-angle gaze.

Bonfort often prints his images on inexpensive materials, and creates small books. In 2011 Bonfort visited Reno, Virginia City, and Pyramid Lake and took hundreds of pictures with his cellphone. Bonfort’s books from that trip, and other trips, are featured in the CA+E Research Library.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and the Metabolic Studio

A 2012 graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno’s MFA program, Amerique Powell’s lively acrylic paintings are explosions of color and pattern. Her works bears the influence of late 20th century art movements, particularly Feminist Art and Pattern and Decoration. In the tradition of these movements, Powell dares to paint using a traditionally domestic, “decorative” palette and populates her faceted, abstract environments with signature images of her playful felines.

According to the artist, “These works are expressions of my ideas about certain possible experiences they may have as small animals living in a bizarre, human world.”

This exhibition is part of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Emerging Artist Series.

Ashley Blalock fuses craft and fine art to create objects and site-specific installations inspired by everyday artifacts from the female domestic sphere. She uses the meditative process of crochet to explore themes of discomfort and coping mechanisms used to provide solace from the stress and trauma of modern life.

Blalock’s site-specific installation, Keeping Up Appearances, consists of vibrant red forms nailed to the wall that are actually giant crochet doilies. Although non-threatening and quaint in a domestic setting, in the gallery and at this scale the forms overtake the viewer and cover the walls.

Reno-born artist Davey Hawkins lives and works in New York, and has taken a special interest in the physical evidence of human industrial interventions with the natural world. Through his installation made with materials derived from chemical by-products, Hawkins’ work demonstrates both an acceptance of environmental degradation in the 21st century, and a desire to transform physical detritus into visual poetry.

Hawkins is a candidate in the Master of Fine Arts graduate program at Columbia University in New York, and expects his MFA in 2014. This exhibition is part of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Emerging Artist Series.