Heart gallery

With the possible exception of Christmas, no holiday conjures up quite as many mixed emotions as Valentine’s Day. For some people, it’s a romantic, zesty occasion. For others, it’s an irritating reminder of their own pathetic loneliness. For others, it’s a forgotten date that quickly transforms into a frenzy of Hallmark purchases. There’s also the sneaking suspicion that the holiday is nothing more than a commercial creation meant to capitalize on our most ineffable emotions. And though the imagery is often cliché, it’s also universal. Santa Claus lives in December, but the human heart is year-round.

So Valentine’s Day is a good occasion for an art show. The mixed emotions associated with the holiday, as well as its themes of love, lust and loneliness, are fodder for artists. This year, the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno presents No Strings Attached, the gallery’s 12th biennial Valentine’s Day invitational art exhibition and auction.

The show features works by more than 70 artists—from Anthony Alston to Joseph Zuccarini. The list of participating artists reads a bit like a “who’s who” of local artists, especially those associated with the university, including current and former faculty, like Rebekah Bogard, Michael Sarich and Tamara Scronce, and current and former students, like Nate Clark, Dominique Palladino and Omar Pierce, as well as national and regional artists who have previously exhibited in the gallery, and other local artists.

Gallery manager Rachel Armstrong says she and gallery director Marji Vecchio came up with the title and theme for this year’s exhibition, No Strings Attached, while discussing a recent tend of artists being really personal and unguarded in their artwork—sort of a positive flipside to the decrease in personal privacy of the internet age.

“We’ve seen a trend of tons of artists being really honest, putting themselves out there in a really open way, just saying, ‘This is who I am,’” says Armstrong.

The show is includes a wide array of styles, sensibilities and media. But, perhaps because of the suggestive exhibition title, the content leans a little toward the bawdy.

Lani Albin’s sculpture “A Woody With No Strings Attached” features a knot of wood so phallic that even a sparkling clean mind will immediately understand the pun in the title. The “woody” in question is painted with bright, nearly psychedelic acrylic colors.

Clint Sleeper’s assemblage “CS Reading NSA” features a stack of books with titles like The Art of Kissing, Are You the One for Me? and How to Romance the Woman You Love, and a pair of headphones. If a gallery visitor puts on the headphones, they hear Sleeper, in a soft, even monotone, reading raunchy “no strings attached” online personal ads.

The gallery walls are decorated with a mural by artists Kelly Peyton and Kaitlin Bryson. Peyton’s scrawling black line work is complemented by Bryson’s painterly splotches of red, pink and white. The mural adds some loose, impressionistic cohesion to the exhibition by uniting the individual pieces on the wall.

“We obviously intentionally left space so that when the work was on the wall, it would interact with the mural, but it also has its own place on the wall,” says Peyton. “I think it looks awesome because it has. I like how it overlaps in some places, so some of the words are lost but you can still kind of tell what it said. … But it almost completes the mural by having the work on there.”

Peyton’s lines occasionally convey nearly subliminal language, like, “I love you … maybe … maybe not.”

“It looks like a drawing,” she says. “It’s a bunch of words and a bunch of strings but none of them are really attached, they’re just falling all over the place, like disconnecting. It’s all kind of loose and falling all over the place, like No Strings Attached.”