In Relative Obscurity II : Without an End in Mind
The title “In Relative Obscurity” was used as an homage to Albert Szukalski and his work “The Last Supper” that inadvertently started a sculpture park in the ghost town of Rhyolite, NV, USA in the 1984. The DVD documentary “Death Valley Project” that came out in 2004, funded by a Nevada Arts Council grant, described the group of established artists and why they chose to create in Rhyolite, Nevada:
“In subsequent years, six additional pieces were added to the site by three other Belgian artists who, like Szukalski, were major figures in European art with extensive exhibition records, but who chose to create in relative obscurity in the Nevada desert near Death Valley in the early 1990s.
UNLV Barrick Museum Editor and Curator DK Sole attended the opening reception for my 2023 exhibition at ASAP Gallery, which would prove to be important later. It was here that the first iteration of In Relative Obscurity, a forty-minute audio/visual artwork funded in part by a project grant by the Nevada Arts Council featuring a segment contributed by John McVay, would be premiered. Alongside the video were paintings that reflected my improvisational approach to painting—an approach I found resonant with the early work of Albert Szukalski.
This exhibition provided me not only the opportunity to debut the audio/visual artwork in a physical setting, but also the valuable experience of sharing it with someone like DK, whose interest and support would later play an important role in my practice.
The event also initiated a two-week residency at the gallery’s former location on the south end of the historic New Orleans Square in Downtown Las Vegas, just off Liberace Drive. During this time, I used the studio space to record guitar and edit video overlays for field recordings captured in the gallery. The building’s distinctive acoustics lent themselves well to the audio works.
The title Without An End in Mind was given to my first ever essay contribution in Marjorie Barrick Museum’s quarterly publication, Dry Heat (Vol. 5), which focused on Goldwell Open Air Museum’s 40th Year Anniversary. My essay was presented as a contemporary reflection in dialogue with the museum’s Executive Director Suzanne Hackett Morgan’s essay on the institution’s formation+history following Szukalski’s passing in 2000.
It was an honor to share how Szukalski’s work influenced my own practice and to describe how encountering his early works in Eenvoudig Dus Moeilijk (Simple, Thus Difficult), a retrospective publication written and released by the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium, has continued to shape my artistic direction since 2022. Writing this essay really forced me to sit down and try to put everything into perspective, and in the end really validated the work I had done; which were two things I desperately needed to do.
You can Listen/Support on Bandcamp or listen on Spotify, etc.
Goldwell’s Red Barn Arts Center from which I recorded both iterations of In Relative Obscurity.
