The Holland Project’s Billboard Gallery showcases the work of exceptional emerging and established regional artists on billboards throughout Reno-Sparks. Three new artists are installed every four weeks. For our last series of 2023, our participating artists are Iyana Esters, Corey Gyll, and Candace Nicol Garlock.
DECEMBER 2023 ARTISTS + WORKS
Location #1: Wells Avenue Bridge, visible when heading North
Artist: Iyana Esters
Artwork: Las Olas Del Mar, digital photography, 2021
Website | Instagram
Bio: Combining her art with her background in folk herbalism and her B.S. and M.P.H. in community and environmental health, Iyana Esters experiments with a multitude of photographic processes including documentary photography, imaging on natural plant materials, and photo mural projects, with an emphasis on highlighting stories about gender, sexuality, and ancestry in the Black + Afrodiaspora. She has been a part of group exhibitions with renowned Minnesotan photographer Wing Young Huie, and has shown her work at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, the Social Documentary Network, Reno City Hall, the Lilley Museum of Art, and public art with the Wedekind Road Art Project. She has taught photography to children and adolescents in Latin America and has been an UP NEXT candidate with Diversify Photo.
Statement: Between my upbringing in the Wild West, and time in the deep south, I have seen the multifaceted beauty of these places and the people who live in them. My parents always encouraged me to express myself and know my roots, which has manifested into photography and my relationship with plants in folk herbalism.
Traveling globally has influenced my knowledge, and my image-making typically relies on naturally-lit compositions using a documentary style, and incorporating plant materials into my projects. I use photography as a lens for storytelling to capture Afrodescendants’ connection with Mama Nature to invoke emotion and thought as these entities alchemize. Las Olas Del Mar is a story that shows the young surfer afro girls on the Pacific Coast of Colombia and the natural connection to the water of the descendants of Cimarrones, and their lives.
Location #2: 4th Street & 6th Street
Artist: Corey Gyll
Artwork: Say Something, paper and ink, 2023
Instagram
Bio: xerox and typefaces. Corey Gyll’s work consists of images distorted through old scanners, fax machines, dot matrix printers, and other assorted electronics, which produce images that can’t be replicated with digital tools. Gyll runs handmade paper through the printers and uses scissors, tape, and glue to create his final pieces. This leads to many error codes, distortions, and malfunctions in the process of making the work, which creates interesting textures and details. Gyll seeks to highlight the unique images that can be created by pushing the limits of the outdated technology they use.
Statement: Some people got something say and no one to say it to.
Location #3: Glendale Avenue & 21st Street
Photo: Candace Nicol Garlock
Artwork: Hope, pen and ink and digital color, 2023
Website | Instagram
Bio: As an artist, Candace Nicol Garlock uses an array of mediums in her work. The coalescence of printmaking techniques, painting, photography (and sculpture, too!) overlap and converge with color, texture and line in a collaboration of mixed, experimental beauty. With her appreciation of the interconnectedness of everything, she elevates relationships: human and environment, human and animal, human and human. She writes, “my multilayered compositions posit engaging questions to viewers regarding relationships, social identities, and societal issues surrounding the female gaze.”
Garlock’s mentorship in student advancement, both artistically and professionally, as well as her engagement and participation in community events makes her a true ambassador of art. She draws inspiration from the collaboration of those around her, through the interplay with students, and continually is organizing collaborative projects. Garlock is a member of Southern Graphics Council International and is a board member for Rocky Mountain Print. A renown printmaker whose work has been shown nationally and internationally, she has received multiple awards including the Reno Tahoe Artist Best in Sculpture/3-D Artworks in 2022 and Best of Show and Best in 2D Mixed Media in 2023, the Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellowship in 2009 and an honorable mention in Printmaking Today, a review of fine art printmaking in Abruzzo, Italy. Nicol’s work can also be seen in 100 Artists of the Male Figure by E.Gibbons.
Statement: There is a beauty—a vulnerability—within each of us. Finding that beauty beneath the suffering of living with chronic illness is the focus of this particular body of work. Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor wrote “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2011, after many years of unexplained symptoms like dizziness, brain fog, memory loss, spasms and tightness in limbs, trouble walking. The road to 2011 was a tough one and most of the time I suffered in silence, thinking it was just psychological and I would wake up one day and it would all be gone. In the years after diagnosis, I began to research chronic illnesses and how they are often marginalized, contested and unrecognized in society.
In 2023, I had another major attack that left me unable to walk without assistance and unable to draw. I started exercising my drawing skills each night, creating Daily Nodes and then finishing them up in Photoshop the next morning. I began to write about my experiences and observations with each Daily Node. The three represented here are from Day 67, 68 and 76. This is what I wrote on Day 67: “Nodes Day 67 (September 29) It’s Friday evening and Anne, Becca and Emsley are in the studio with me. Today was a good reminder that hope is an important concept. It’s hope that keeps me going. And I’m lucky! I have so many people surrounding me that love me and go along with my crazy collaboration projects. Thanks everyone! See you in Fallon soon!”