For the past four years, The Holland Project has been a beneficiary of the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based non-profit publisher Radius Books‘ expansive donation and education program, which donates 350 copies of every book they publish to libraries, schools, arts organizations, and community centers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Now with a collection of over dozens of Radius Book titles in the HP Library, we have selected fourteen and prompted regional artists to do a deep dive and respond to these incredible sources of inspiration.

Participating artists hail from across Nevada, including Abbay Anderson, Kelly Chorpening, Mark Combs, Matthew Couper, Christian Davies, Sam Ganados, Skylar Jory, Tiffany Lin, Brian Martinez, Emily Najera, Edgar Padilla, Ika Pearl, Andie Pereyra, Cesar Piedra, Luke Rizzotto, Alejandra Rubio, and D Stevens. Radius publications featured Tarek Atoui, Julie Blackmon, Debi Cornwall, Debbie Flemming Caffery, David Goldes, Ted Larsen, Deborah Roberts, Howard Smith, John Sonsini, Vincent Valdez, Cecilia Vicuña, Cameron Welch, Alex Yudzon, and others.

Each artwork in Cross Reference is guided by a Radius book while simultaneously reflecting each artist’s own practices and aesthetics. As part of the installation, books and art are displayed together, allowing viewers to make connections and explore the collection.

Last night was a movie. (You were streaming perpetual war.) The sidewalk is my runway. (A camera on every door.) Strike a pose. (The angle from your eye to your nose.) Anything can be a face nowadays. Who designed the costumes for those political actors? Towards stylish art; a stylist’s artist. Wearable sculpture. Appareled in criminality. Performance or the real thing? Collage as garment. The fabric of our lives. A heart on your sleeve. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Patterning, pinning, drape. A tracked body. A body of work working to evade capture. The clothes-body unit. To mend, to extend. Errant frequencies of desire. Peace-on-earth officer on the floor. Quick and easy returns. Pure time out of nowhere. Historicism’s ripped trousers. Out of the closet and into the gallery.

This show has been seized as an opportunity to continue to reincorporate one’s former loves of fashion design, styling, and image-making into their practice at large. To “put on” again fashion’s unique capacities to inspire self-discovery and solidarity, complicate cultural norms, and undermine world structures. It’s an impulse to clarify for oneself where this potential lies within the context of capitalism’s regulating drive towards self-identification through commerce, the relative ease with which one can adopt a “look”, and the persistent desire to be seen while surveillance technology infiltrates most aspects of our lives.