Mary Warner, Mark Brandvik, Emily Kennerk "Dreamhouse"
Winchester Cultural Center
Exhibition April 6 – June 1 Artist
Reception: Friday, April 13 5:30-7:30 PM

This exhibit of paintings and sculpture features the work of three artists dealing with the image of house and home. Their work calls into question the American Dream, society’s constructed notion of the "perfect" home, and the seduction of architecture and objects.

The artists explore how home ownership in today’s economy now traps rather than stabilizes; how it can become a tragic burden holding a resident back instead of a sign of getting ahead. The loss of a home and its attached investments of love, labor and home improvement and refinanced loans may undo Americans.

Emily Kennerk’s work has dealt with American preoccupations with being #1. "America’s #1 Series" included an installation of assorted #1 kitchen products, from the flooring to the appliances, that highlighted the banal within the supposed "dream house". In her 2010 Las Vegas exhibition, "America’s #1 Foreclosed Clty: Las Vegas", the artist pointed to the tragedy of the local foreclosure crisis in her 22-hour video that paid homage to every foreclosed home in the city from the year 2009.

Mark Brandvik is known for his treatment of Las Vegas architecture as idealized forms in his paintings that call to mind religious iconography. The seductive surfaces and colors compel the viewer, yet the stark, quite compositions and stylized, flat forms also suggest absence, keeping one at arm’s length.

Mary Warner’s paintings have used a favorite architectural image to contemplate domesticity within a utopian desire; an image that embodies the life that she or we imagine. Her images become idols of worship, solitary homes placed in idealized landscapes, distant, elusive, and beautiful.

Mary Warner is visual artist with an impressive and extensive national exhibition and award history, including fellowships from the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nevada Arts Council’s 2011 Governor’s Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts. Warner received both her Bachelor of Fine Arts and her Master of Fine Arts from California State, Sacramento. She returns to Sacramento to retire to her "dream home" this summer after thirty-seven years of teaching art, most recently at UNLV where she was an associate professor of Painting and Drawing from 1994-2011.

A Las Vegas native, Mark Brandvik earned his bachelor’s degree in art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1996 and his master’s degree in fine art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. He exhibits his work nationally and currently teaches as an adjunct professor at UNLV. He has been a contributor to downtown’s redevelopment through his own historic preservation projects since 2000.

Emily Kennerk completed her undergraduate work at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana, and received her master’s degree at Cranbrook Academy of Fine Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She exhibits her work internationally, and in 2008 she joined the UNLV faculty where she heads the sculpture department as associate professor.