"Tomorrow's Man"

4-21-16
On Thursday April 21^st I attended the opening reception for the exhibition Tomorrow’s Man containing work of 19 various artists and is quest-curated by Jack Pierson.  This exhibition took place in the Sheppard Contemporary gallery in the Church Fine Arts building on the University of Nevada’s campus.  These works are of a variety of media, including drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and video. 

This exhibition was very interesting in terms of the different pieces that were chosen to be exhibited in this show and their content.  Most of the paintings displayed were abstract paintings, and I enjoyed looking at them, they were some of the more interesting and pleasant abstract paintings that I have seen.  Jack Pierson himself is openly gay and shows this in his personal work.  There were a few pieces that showed this, however I do not know whether these specific pieces were Pierson’s or not.  There was a list of the artists names and the names of their pieces written down, but the pieces were numbered and I couldn’t find the corresponding numbers on the walls next to the pieces themselves, so I wasn’t able to know who the artist was for each piece.  There were a few pieces that consisted of photography and a quote that goes with the photos presented.  These pieces I really enjoyed even if I didn’t quite understand what was trying to be said by putting the two together.  On one wall there were photographs in four rows, all the same size and each were a picture of some kind of explosion with a phrase over the picture.   Some of the phrases were things like: “Bulging Muscles”, “Family Reunion”, and “Complete Release”.   I’m not sure if these explosions are supposed to represent how one can feel at times about what is written on each picture, knowing the name of the piece might have helped with better understanding this piece, but I did enjoy looking at it and reading the phrases none the less.  Another piece was four separate photos with fifth containing the quote “Do what must be done as soon as you can”.  I liked this piece as well because I agree with the quote used the photos are nice black and white photos that seemed to be an up-close photo of something, possibly different types of plants and its leaves.

Overall this exhibition was really interesting in terms of the pieces chosen for the exhibit.  There were a few pieces that I really liked, while others continue to make me feel kind of confused because I wasn’t sure what I was looking at or the purpose of the piece.  This was a very interesting exhibit to attend but I am glad I did.