T
he Sparks Heritage Museum is hosting a largely lighthearted group show this August, featuring work by local artists Norm Lamont, John Molezzo, and Joan Arrizabalaga. It’s a bit of a grab-bag, thematically, but there are plenty of amusements and flashes of wit to be seen.
Norm Lamont, a self-described “Maker of Things,” covers a lot of bases in this exhibition, displaying sculptures, prints on canvas, and jewelry. Several modestly scaled ceramic figures are made in a comic vein, like three-dimensional gag cartoons, goggle-eyed and looking hapless. My favorite of these is titled “Pickle Ricks,” which collects several pickles with human faces stuffed in a glass jar, submerged in water. Each pickle wears a demented smile, pressed against the glass—the cartoonish humor they evoke is slightly unnerving. There is a visual bridge between the sculptures and some of Lamont’s jewelry. While several are primarily abstract designs, some incorporate small, sculpted faces, eyes and mouths closed, settled peacefully into their metal settings.
There are a couple of collaged sculptures that incorporate doll parts—one, titled “All Dolls Go to Heaven,” features a doll on the move, driving (and perhaps even fused with) a winged and wheeled mode of transportation, built mainly out of a vintage roller skate. Lamont’s most attention-grabbing piece, “Send in the Clowns… Don’t worry, they’re here,” is a kinetic sculpture that can be set into motion at the press of a black button (a small placard politely requests you push the button one more time to shut it off, when you’re done). When the button is pushed, four baby doll heads—evenly spaced atop a metal rectangle and each ensconced in their own bell jar—begin to rotate. Their craniums are neatly cut at the hat line, and plastic brains emerge exposed, like cogitating islands. Three of these brains are bright orange, and a fourth is transparent, containing a few loose screws. Set whirling, their centrifugal gazes blankly scanning the room, they seem plugged into to our present cultural moment—no pauses to see or to think, caught in a relentless whirlwind in stimulation—the cranium as hamster wheel.
John Molezzo is represented by a set of multimedia pieces on canvas that blend photography and painting. They depict urban scenes, with a focus on retro signage. One piece is dominated by the sign for the Golden West Motor Lodge. The abandoned motel was demolished in 2016, through Reno’s “blight fund.” The sign itself was rescued by local preservationist Will Durham, who has amassed a substantial collection of decommissioned Nevada neon. Of course Molezzo’s painting is an act of rescue itself, requiring substantially less storage space.
Another piece, “Midnight Drive,” shows a cityscape subsumed by signage. The scene looks fairly naturalistic at first glance, as if the viewer is perhaps looking out across a parking lot through the gaps in a sign, but the scale of things doesn’t quite pencil out, and at a certain point there seems to be an interchangeability between the “real” car in the foreground, and the cartoon car crowning the spire of the “Sandman Hotel” sign at the top right of the canvas. That interchangeability is lubricated by the loose brushwork Molezzo applies over the photographic skeleton of the image, making everything foggy and aswirl. You feel caught in a plate-glass crossfire between what is being reflected by a surface and what’s actually on the other side—that weird, faintly omniscient state when you can see what’s in front of you and what’s behind you at the same time. Even that visual interpretation is too tethered to physical reality. Looking at the canvas is like being caught in a cross-dissolve between multiple establishing shots. All of Molezzo’s canvases have a cinematic flavor to them—though they’re full-color, any one of them could be an appropriate setting for the dénouement of a film noir.
Joan Arrizabalaga, like Lamont, brings work in a variety of media, though all of her pieces refer to games and gambling, cards or dice—running that circuit between chance, calculation, and cash. Two sculptures exhibit a jaundiced playfulness—one is a literal “card shark” hung from the ceiling, the sleek predatory body plastered over with playing cards. The slit pupil of the eye, made of glass, is set into the dark heart of an ace of spades from a Bee playing card deck (a brand widely used in casinos). This predator seems about to get out-predatored: dangling in front of its snout is a hundred dollar bill, speared by a large hook, outfitted with a bright red lure of dice.
Her second sculpture, titled “Pigeons,” is built around a full-size bench. Ceramic pigeons are arranged both on the bench and below it. The plumage has been modified on a few of them, in one instance patterned with playing card suits, in another with cursive script that reads “Sometimes you are the pigeon, sometimes the statue.” Instead of bread crumbs, the pigeons are pecking at a scatter of tiny, brightly colored plastic dice. Though the ceramic pigeons are frozen, it’s easy to imagine the jackhammer pursuit of their immediate desire…