Las Vegas Weekly

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For the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Las Vegas artist Troy Gillett used T-shirts from a post-9/11 shrine outside New York-New York hotel to create two towers at UNLV’s Lied Library. The pillars of very neatly stacked T-shirts were twisted and connected with horizontal bars, mimicking a DNA double helix as if to say, This is us. All of us. We’re inextricably linked. In message and material, “Common Threads” invited a personal and collective contemplation.

With “Inner Sanctum,” on exhibit now at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda, Gillett has us once again reflecting. This time the artist—who received his BA from UNLV in 1994 and only recently returned to art—used old, wooden, paint-chipped doors and reclaimed wood to construct a circular, enclosed (save for the roof) space that serves as part sanctuary, part portal and part nod to transition, memory and opportunity.

Visitors are welcome to enter the installation, which, in its shape, texture and multiple entrances, mimics the Rotunda itself. Symbolism is again at the forefront. The use of doors—objects loaded with collective and personal history—evokes memory and a sense of home in a city where home ownership is in crisis.

Crude in materials, yet precisely built, the structure brings to mind quietude, reflection, privacy and transition. The doors, gathered from foreclosed or demolished houses, seem to hold their own stories, adding to Inner Sanctum’s depth.