Glitter Ghosts

Glitter Ghosts is an online exhibition of new artwork by students from Wendy Kveck’s UNLV contemporary art seminar, “Finding America in Las Vegas.”* Daydreaming of Vegas nights. . .The desert landscape of the newly dimmed Las Vegas Strip haunts as it beckons to be seen, touched, heard and felt. The Glitter Ghosts are everywhere at once, yet nowhere at all. Locals and tourists have different memories of the Las Vegas Strip, but everyone who has been there has a personal connection to it. In Las Vegas, you place your bets, but now all bets are off. Glitter Ghosts invokes themes of memory and the body, place and placelessness, distance and absence, in an iconic but elusive geography.

Lauren Sato imagines Las Vegas as a hyperbolic consumer landscape via digital collage. Ilyana Raymond depicts mythical creatures in harmony with the Strip’s tourist population and borrowed monuments. Erin K Drew, John McVay and Emily Sarten import the glitter and mythos from the city’s tawdriest souvenirs into an ASMR audio companion. Brian Martinez offers an anomalous view of Las Vegas’s lights, unique to East Side residents. Fawn Douglas traces the Paiute tradition of gaming as a vital form of community gathering. Lindsay Olson uses synthetic light and natural life to investigate ideas of survival, high contrasts, and what we call home.

*Strip Cultures: Finding America in Las Vegas by the Project on Vegas published by Duke University Press in 2015 was an entry point for the seminar.