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 July-August series in 2024, participating artists are Rora Blue, Ashley Brock, and Glynn B. Cartledge
JULY-AUGUST 2024 ARTISTS + WORKS
Location #1: South Virginia Street, near Cheney Street (Midtown)
Artist: Rora Blue
Artwork: I’d Rather Be Here, site-specific installation, 2020
Website | Instagram
Bio: Rora Blue is a queer disabled artist living and working in Reno, Nevada. His current work utilizes soft sculpture and installation to relate queerness and disability to nature, invisibility, and celebration. He photographs his bed in the forest, weaves flowers into bandages, and suspends images of the sky within IV bags. Blue is the recipient of the VSA Emerging Young Artist Award of Excellence from the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C as well as the International IphiGenia Gender Design Award awarded at the Museum of Applied Art in Cologne, Germany. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions spanning nine different countries and he has been written about in publications including the New York Times. Blue received his BFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2024.
Statement:
If I am going to be stuck in bed, I’d rather be here.
Imagine you are stuck in bed for two months. You can maneuver around the house for short periods of time throughout the day. Time feels long and short. It takes you over an hour to take a shower and 30 minutes to brush your hair. It seems like other people have more hours in the day. Out of your bedroom window are lush green rolling hills a couple of miles away. The grass is so green it is almost glowing. You look at the hills from your bed and think about how much you’d rather be there. Not running through the grass but just lying up there in your bed. You want the sun to hit your face and you want the wind to reassure you that the earth is still alive.
I’d Rather Be Here is a series of site-specific installations in which I transport my bed to various outdoor landscapes. There are the places I’d rather be, when I have to spend long periods of time in bed due to my physical disability. This photograph was taken on top of the hills I could see from my northern California bedroom window in the spring of 2020.
Location #2: Wells Avenue & Vesta Street
Artist: Ashley Brock
Artwork: The Land Yacht, acrylic and linen on wood panel, 2024
Instagram
Bio: Influenced by life’s transient nature, Nevada-based artist Ashley Brock draws inspiration from everyday observations and experiences. She works primarily with abandoned or discarded objects found in proximity, using her practice to explore complex relationships between self and other. She received her BFA from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Statement: The act of elevating a dilapidated trailer to a place of significance represents an inversion of traditional values. “The Land Yacht” is a reminder that amidst decay and disregard, there exists profound resilience. By shedding light on the overlooked and neglected, this piece celebrates the enduring strength of the human spirit and invites us to find beauty in unexpected places.
Location #3: Keystone Avenue between 2nd & 4th Street
Artist: Glynn B. Cartledge
Artwork: Hush, oil on canvas, 2024
Website | Instagram
Bio: In the remote desert area of Ely, Nevada, wearing a black pinstripe suit, she strode into the cavernous waiting room of a maximum-security prison to meet her new client. The “cop-killer.” Edward. A 6’2” comely Death Row inmate, he stood anxiously at attention anticipating her arrival. After pulling away from the stranger’s needy hug, she noticed his inscrutable blue eyes beaming through a flat affect. There he was – her innocent charge. The man she would represent for the next twenty years.
Glynn Cartledge spent twenty-five years working as a criminal defense lawyer before pursuing a career as an artist whose work explores ideas of criminality, incarceration, recidivism, and justice in America. Her pieces have appeared nationally and internationally, and she is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Atlantic Center for the Arts Fellow; Santa Fe Art Institute Justice Fellow; Nevada Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship and Project Fellowship; Billboard Creative Billboard Award and Grant; Vermont Studio Center Emily Mason-Wolf Kahn Fellowship; and Pollock-Krasner Fellowship.
Statement: Ninety-five degrees. Late May in Corpus Christi, Texas. Bobby on the phone wanting to talk, “I was incarcerated at Huntsville, a devilish brick institution. I got locked up for a b&e and put in a violent housing unit before Bush or Obama or whoever passed PREA, the Prison Rape Elimination Act.”
Cartledge draws upon her experience in criminal defense to showcase the precarious world of incarceration, release, recidivism, the aesthetics of guilt, and the ways in which conviction follows us beyond the point of penalty. She does this with oil portraits, multimedia collages, prison floor cloths, and recorded firsthand accounts. Criminal justice provides raw material for a lifelong pursuit the artist has had to investigate, deconstruct, and come to terms with utopian ideas of justice in the face of continued misinterpretation, manipulation, and all too often its conspicuous absence. Her views of the failing justice system certainly are not original; many share these views, but as an artist and attorney, her hope is that what she brings to the artwork is original because it comes from firsthand experience working within the system.
