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 November series in 2024, participating artists are Kelly Chorpening, Ashley Frost, and Kara Savant.
NOVEMBER 2024 ARTISTS + WORKS
Location #1: S Virginia Street & La Rue Avenue
Artist: Kelly Chorpening
Artwork: Look (Peavine Mountain Foothills), 2024, photograph
Website | Instagram
Bio: Kelly Chorpening is an artist, curator, writer, and educator with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Her work explores drawing as a contemporary art discipline and tool for thinking and communication across disciplines. In 2016, she was shortlisted for both the Derwent and Jerwood drawing prizes, and she has had solo presentations of work in the UK, USA, and Austria. She has had residencies at Voorkamer and Sint-Lucas Academy (Belgium), Punk & Sheep (London), Shandy Hall, The Laurence Sterne Trust (N. Yorkshire, UK) and Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh). Many of her projects are co-developed as books, published by Studio International (USA), RGAP (UK), Sint-Lucas Visual Arts, and OPAK, FAK, KULeuven (Belgium). In 2021, she co-edited and contributed to A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, published by Wiley Blackwell. The results of a curatorial project, “Drawing in Social Space,” were exhibited at Drawing Room London in 2023. The project involved artists and communities from around the UK, USA, Bolivia, Morocco, Netherlands, Ghana, and Russia, exploring collective processes of drawing.
Statement: Drawing for me is an endeavor that intertwines technical and philosophical aims when observing and recording aspects of nature. A practice of walking enables me to challenge the idea of landscape with the reality of what I see and experience. With origins in Romanticism, I know I have been conditioned to see the landscape as something to escape to and to behold: just trace Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ to present-day holiday brochures. I want my work to go beyond this flawed dynamic.
My work can be classified as ‘still life’, and as ‘Realism.’ It involves a process of gathering natural objects such as rocks, sticks, and tree bark, and depicting them alongside plastic, bullet casings, and bags of dog shit, within compositions that are both harmonious and unsettling. This is a world where man-made materials are increasingly enmeshed in places they should not be.
I employ a detailed method of drawing that conjures for the viewer, slowed-down, close attention. This enables dramatic contrasts between the eye-catching gleam of plastic, next to a weathered, broken branch. My version of realism is this reality, where as an artist, I strive for a more empathetic relationship to objects, in order to recognize intermingling states of strength, fragility, becoming, and decay.
I identify with the premise of Jane Bennett’s 2010 book Vibrant Matter. It challenges the ‘quarantines of matter and life [that] encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material transformations.’ (Bennett 2010: vii, original emphasis) The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that ‘our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with.’ (Appadurai 1986: 5) It’s critically important that Bennet’s book begins with the description of debris in a gutter. Discarded objects (gloves, pollen, rat, cap, stick) share the same fate, away from human attention. This creates a new space for contemplation, where, as Bennett says, ‘stuff exhibit[s} its thing-power.’ (Bennett 2010: 4) Though I know I can’t escape the inherent contradiction that I am a human ascribing meaning to inanimate objects, it still seems important to create artworks that take us beyond pre-conditioned meanings and hierarchies to try and understand them differently.
Recently, I have extended my practice to include digital scanning and printing. Drawing and painting onto 3D-printed objects is a surprisingly collaborative process. The scanner captures some objects, that when 3D printed, are near exact copies. Yet in other areas, often the deep recesses between, the lack of information leads to the machine-equivalent of ‘making things up’. This fiction, or vague understanding of the facts, is given concrete form. Though at an early stage, I am finding the back and forth between what I can see and do, and what the machine is capable of scanning and printing, both conceptually and visually meaningful.
Bennett, Jane (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1986) ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, A. Appadurai, (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press pp 3-63
Location #2: Keystone Avenue between 2nd & 4th Streets
Artist: Ashley Frost
Artwork: Cushioning My Existential Crisis, 2024, one giant pillow
Instagram
Bio: Ashley Frost is an artist based in Reno, Nevada. They graduated from UNR with their BFA in Spring of 2023 with an emphasis in drawing. Frost enjoys birdwatching in their daily life. They’ve recently added bird feeders to their front yard and spend their time documenting and gazing at Reno’s avian life.
Statement: Pillows represent a unique luxury—intimate and often a site of vulnerability. They are objects we engage with throughout our lives. Personally, I sleep with an abundance of pillows; my partner and I have about seven that we use every night. I have a friend who clings to one sad, deflated pillow they’ve cherished for a decade, while my parents prefer a single memory foam pillow. When I asked another friend about pillows, they said, “They’re awesome! A lovely luxury that I don’t think about… but when I don’t have one, I definitely think about it.” This simple, yet profound observation, highlights how we often take everyday objects for granted in our fast-paced world… so, why a giant pillow?
The primary reason for creating such an oversized pillow is absurdity and silliness. Giant advertisements dominate our visual landscape, saturating our subconscious with their relentless imagery. These behemoths, while effective at conveying information, often overshadow the natural world, filling our mental and physical spaces in an extremely disruptive manner. I aim to occupy that same visual space with an image of comfort and solace. In a world that often feels absurd and overwhelming, I find my greatest comfort in the quiet, intimate moments of the night, just before sleep.
Spontaneity guides my mark-making on the pillow’s surface as I bring a joyful and imaginative essence of life to my art. I leave physical documentation of life that I’ve encountered, such as birds and their cautious curiosity. My daily walks have led me to become more familiar with local bird life, which has been translated onto my pillow’s surface along with other whimsical imprints of different living beings.
Special thanks to The Holland Project for extending this opportunity to me. Also, thank you to Jayden, Goose, Nala, Mom, & Dad for being willing subjects to draw references from. Thank you to David and Benjamin for your support through this journey of a project. It has been an absolute delight.
Location #3: Wells Avenue and 2nd Street
Artist: Kara Savant
Artwork: Greetings from South Fork Nevada, 2024, digital collage
Website | Instagram
Bio: Kara Savant is a fifth generation Nevadan, strongly rooted in her home state. As a child, she spent countless hours with her six siblings constructing forts out of abandoned campers, discarded lumber, and deserted treasures found in the rural hills of Elko. Her infatuation of creating something out of nothing later translated into both her 2D and 3D art practice where she now spends her time using found objects and various building materials to construct works of art that speak to home, nostalgia, and design. Kara resides in Reno working as a color consultant to put food on the table for her wife, cat, and pup.
Statement: Reaching South Fork requires traveling over a summit turning onto a two-lane highway, then navigating miles of powdered dirt roads just south of Elko, Nevada. A green swampy lake lies in the middle of this high desert terrain, cradled in the shadows of the Ruby Mountains. Mobile homes are scattered throughout the hills overlooking this body of water. It’s difficult to explain the draw to this dissolute reservoir, for those who have yet to experience it.
South Fork was where I spent weekends. In and out of the screen door attached to my father’s doublewide, I was surrounded by sagebrush, discarded furnishings, vehicle carcasses, and weathered homes. Those who habitat the space haul in corals and livestock and sheds and motor vehicles and more motor vehicles. And families. Sun-baked kids roam the hills riding bikes, building forts, and exploring the fossils of rusted beer cans in the tick-covered brush. In the middle of it reigns the man-made lake that hosts boats, jet-skis, and locals all the same.
“No Return Address” is an homage to one of the many places that raised me. I am the Coors koozie, fuel drenched lake water, powdered dirt, and Marlboro smoke that makes up South Fork, Nevada.
