Long goodbye

The Salvagery Artist Collective has been active for little more than a year, but already they’ve left an indelible print on Reno’s burgeoning art community. A project for last year’s Artown, which brought together a group of artists to individually paint a series of pianos distributed throughout downtown Reno, evolved into a collaborative group of artists who were not only curating art shows, but working tirelessly at producing their own work.

For the past year, they’ve been using a gallery and warehouse at Hobson Square on east Fourth Street designed by Reno’s prolific architect Fredrick Delongchamps. He designed more than 500 other buildings, among them the downtown post office, which still stands as Reno’s finest example of Art Deco. But, in the next couple of weeks, the collective is going to decide definitively on a new home from a few different facilities that they have been considering.

Though the collective loves the space, there are many issues with the building that make it difficult to work out of.

“We just outgrew it,” says Alex Lemus, a local photographer and Salvagery member. Aside from structural issues, Lemus says there were also electrical ones. “With winter coming up, it just gets too difficult to work with no heat.”

To help ease the transition into a new home, the Salvagery artists are presenting an art exhibit, Transitions, featuring some of their new work, as well as work from artists who have been working with them peripherally for the last year, such as stone and metal sculptor Colin O’Brien, and veteran Reno artist Greg Allen, who currently has work hanging at Jungle Vino.

Salvagery member Ryan Ostler says the exhibit, with a reception on Nov. 4 from 7 to 10 p.m., is meant “to help financially make the transitional leap into the new space.”

Because they have put up 18 shows within the last year alone, the group is looking to spend less time curating and devote more time to working on their individual and collaborative work, as well as continuing to provide educational art classes for the community.

“We’re trying to put together a larger collaborative workspace with a lot of different entities,” says Ostler. “So we’re looking for a facility to that is able to accommodate large building projects, individual art studios, as well as communal studios.”

But the aim of the facility is also to help nurture developing artists who are on the fence about their own aspirations, as well as continuing to help those artists who are currently active to fine tune their craft.

“We want to put in a facility that can take an individual artist, and have them take a project from conception, to creation, to portfolio, to out into the world where they can possibly sell it,” says Ostler.

As for the exhibition, the Salvagery hopes to showcase new work that they have been working on for the past few months. Lemus hasn’t put up an individual show in more than a year, but has been shooting incessantly, and he’ll present new work. Eric Santi and Kelly Oglvie have been working together on some collaborative works that Ostler describes as, “a new line of work, specifically for this show.”

This art reception will be a fundraiser and a way for the group to say goodbye to Hobson Square as a headquarters for their production. They’ve been productive from this home, and though the group is sad to leave it behind, they are excited to start afresh. The best way to progress to the next stage is by uprooting and finding new pastures from which to cultivate, new venues from which to innovate.