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 September-October series in 2024, participating artists are Matthew Gavrilles, Brent Holmes, and Anna Newman.
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2024 ARTISTS + WORKS
Location #1: Wells Avenue & Kuenzli
Artist: Matthew Gavrilles
Artwork: Sinus Like Cavern, Face of Fire, 2024, acrylic on board, colored pencil, digital scan, procreate
Instagram
Bio: Matthew Gavrilles is a mixed-media artist exploring issues of identity, presentation, and mental health through his work. He is currently studying art at the University of Nevada, Reno while contributing to the local art and music scene, where the diverse range of perspectives inform his approach to visual art.
Statement: This work is a part of a larger project of mine, serving as an outlet to process my interactions with identity, sexuality, and grief. I focus on depicting human bodies and faces, allowing for relatability of concepts otherwise difficult to explain. My mixed media approach to this piece and others in the series is a part of expanding my process, allowing for multiple iterations of a work using vastly different mediums and combining them, as well as a more therapeutic perspective on the creation of art.
Location #2: 888 S Virginia Street
Artist: bRENT hOLMES
Artwork: 3 Match Books Outside of Sparks, Nevada, 2024, mixed media
Instagram
Bio: Brent Holmes describes himself as a creative roustabout. They have had a hand in developing the arts in southern Nevada, through community engagement and social practice for two decades. Their work generates dialogues around temporality, epistemological enmity, individualism, and identity. Holmes believes that the act of art-making experienced by the artist is the art not what is presented to others those are the remains of the act. Their recent work grapples with blackness in isolation, throughout the arid West and its relationship to the elegiac legacy of western expansion.
Statement: These are Matchbooks for an imaginary West.
Location #3: Keystone Avenue between 2nd Street and 4th Street
Artist: Anna Newman
Artwork: Keeping the Trains Running, Nevada Northern Railway, digital photography, 2024
Website | Instagram
Bio: Anna Newman lives and works in Reno, Nevada. A reformed Silicon Valley engineer, she moved to Reno to focus on art full-time. Newman is a PhotoLucida Critical Mass Finalist (2022) and the recipient of two Weston Scholarship awards in photography. A project-based artist whose work resonates with history, her documentary films have been exhibited at Sundance and many other film festivals, in addition to museums in the United States and Canada. Newman is pursuing an MFA in Visual Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, and recently co-curated Hand Wash Only for the 2024 Holland Project Curator Series. This fall she will be exhibiting in a collaborative show in Seoul, South Korea.
Statement: I like to tell stories about undervalued places and materials. Whether I am upcycling cardboard shipping cartons into vintage motel sign sculptures, screen printing on outmoded office supplies, or repurposing waste from the waters of Lake Tahoe, I am investigating the overlooked. I began photographing the people, places, and trains of the historic Nevada Northern Railway in Ely, Nevada in 2020 and continue to find inspiration in their work and landscape. The steam locomotives of NNR require incredible amounts of effort to run and keep running and the research, ingenuity, and dedication of the volunteers and employees working with the antique equipment amazes and fascinates me. You can learn more about NNR and explore its vast online digital archives at nnry.com.