Sin city sampler: in a kind of postscript to Site Santa Fe, critic and curator Dave Hickey chose 14 works by his former students for a show keyed to the art and artifice of Las Vegas - Report From Santa Fe

Critic and curator Dave Hickey has devoted a lot of time to the subjects of beauty and pleasure, their repercussions, and related musings specific to Las Vegas, where he lives. In recent years, that city (the fastest growing in the U.S.) has developed a substantial art-world presence, with commercial galleries continuing to open, casinos numbering serious art exhibitions among their entertainment's and the Guggenheim Las Vegas (with its Rem Koolhaas-designed building) becoming an attraction in itself [see A.i.A., Dec. '01].

Fresh from curating the widely praised 2001 edition of the SITE Santa Fe biennial [see A.i.A., Nov. '01], Hickey narrowed his focus last winter to organize "[Las] Vegans," a group show at Santa Fe's James Kelly Contemporary, a gallery situated right across the street from SITE's exhibition space. Comprising 14 works by 11 onetime Las Vegas artists, this small but scintillating show essentially constituted an ode to the desert city. The selected artists are all former Hickey students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches art criticism and theory. (All works are from 2001 unless otherwise indicated.) Sharing Las Vegas as reference and source, these artists wittily address notions of nature and artifice, drawing on the city's amplified reality, hyperbolic appropriation and sheer glitz.

The show--which at first glance evoked an enticing synthetic bake sale--projected a visually seductive and surprisingly cohesive esthetic, one derived, paradoxically, from a wide range of styles, including Pop art, Op art, the Pattern and Decoration movement, Hard-Edge abstraction and Abstract Expressionism. Collectively, the pieces Hickey chose share a propensity for intense artificial color fields; an emphasis on design and decoration, light and surface; and a fondness for illusion. Their surfaces are frequently polished, with little evidence of the artist's hand. Within the show's idiosyncratic framework, the works fell into loose thematic pairings: the spiritual/fantastical, the domestic/recreational, and the natural/artificial.

Installed near the entrance to the show, Yek's large atmospheric painting on a concave panel set the stage with a note of spiritual edginess. An airbrushed field, into which curving calligraphic lines intrude from the edges, offers luminescent color gradations that range from deep violet to vibrant magenta. Evoking James Turrell's ambient light works, subtle fluctuations of hue, triggered by shifts in the viewer's vantage point, suggest fierce sunsets and ebbing light over Nevada's endless horizons, or the lingering phosphorescent afterglow of flickering neon signs. Jane Callister's Liquid Mindscape depicts hallucinogenic mountain terrains against an acid-green background. White and pale pink peaks, outlined with gooey chocolate-colored paint drips, are punctuated with gray chunks of rock.

The trippy surfaces of Jack Hallberg's paintings, which appear to have been made with cake-decorating tools, feature candy-colored ribbons of paint beaded with glow-in-the-dark acrylic versions of miniature Hershey's Kisses. The latter suggest circuitous highways, aerial views of night-lit airport runways or drawers filled with costume jewelry. Another fantastical landscape, done by Sush Machida Gaikotsu in the Japanimation vein, depicts emerald green grass and a plum horizon, with shadowy elk wading in a blurry body of turquoise water. In the foreground, a smiling dog, its white coat punctuated with fuchsia patches, hangs from a grayish branch that looks like a cloud wisp; a snake and wildly colored birds keep him company.

In the nominally more settled realms of domestic space and design, quirky contrasts are set up between physical interiors and exterior settings. James Gobel's deadpan but striking rendering of a '50s-style sunroom, made from pieces of cut felt, features a bright orange armchair framed in aluminum, along with a cropped mud-brown rug patterned with large swirls and puddles in shades of mustard-yellow. Above a slab of white wall, the edge of a window reveals a sliver of blurry blue-green foliage. The sharp delineation of this orderly interior space, set against the small impressionistic image of nature, invokes varying levels of reality and existence. In a similar juxtaposition, Almond Zigmund's aluminum-mounted digital Lambda print Rose Road (2001) shows a slanted view of an azure sky or, perhaps, a swimming pool cropped by wedges of quilted white upholstery that are themselves framed by a brilliant red armature. Here again, nature is present but almost incidental.

As elegant and humorous antidotes to quotidian life, Curtis Fairman's and Robert Acuna's works suggest recreational escapes. Fairman's wall assemblages incorporate Tupperware bowls, a baby-bottle nipple, stainless-steel stove-top burner rings and other utilitarian equipment, simultaneously evoking hubcaps and bosoms. Acuna's Ride the Rhythm (2001), an oblong panel with a glossy crimson-red reflective surface broken by a wide purple band, could substitute as a surfboard. The only freestanding work in the show, Aaron Baker's colorful kitschy sculpture made of assorted plastic and rubber objects, featured a long sinewy-looking neck. True to its title--A Little Something Pretty Awful--the piece suggests a cross between a decorative Murano vase and some kind of drug paraphernalia.