Las Vegas Weekly

Barrick exhibit looks at photography as a diverse medium

Photo: Darius Kuzmickas

The quizzical nature of camera obscura is amusing in and of itself, but Darius Kuzmickas adds another layer of intrigue to the process in his series, “Camera Obscura: Outside In(n),” on display in Barrick Museum’s Exploring Photographic Alternatives.

Inverted cityscapes, projected onto the walls of somber, inhabited apartment and hotel rooms, create a dreamlike, weighted reality in which the hassles of the outside world are inescapable. The photos are beautiful, lonely, stunning and intimate, enhanced by the visual depth of Kuzmickas’ work, which has viewers looking into the spaces, rather than at them.

Photo: Darius Kuzmickas

The Portland resident is one of three photographers featured in the Barrick show. The series, he says, is designed to question our “perceptions of the spaces we call our own.” Moreover, it portrays the difficulty of finding quiet when the world is crashing through your thoughts and weighing you down.

Las Vegas artist Diane Bush, the show's curator, explores different approaches to the medium of photography in this exhibit. Known for her politically charged works, she continues her process of manipulating large-scale photographs by splashing or pouring bleach onto them. “Blanket of Lies,” her recent series of abstract works—grid-like, striated and piercing—are motivated by global atrocities against women.

New Mexico artist Holly Roberts distorts and plays with precepts of nature in her mixed-media works, incorporating painting and photography. The dreamlike and somewhat primitive vignettes and narratives created from pieced-together photographs of inanimate objects, landscapes and body parts—human and animal—are eerily compelling visual fairy tales.