Artist reception and Holiday Art Bar

CAC will present the reception for the artists participating in the 8th Lahontan Valley Invitational and its annual Holiday Art Bar tonight at the Oats Park Art Center, from 5-9 p.m.

Artists participating in the exhibition of recent works by Fallon/Churchill County artist include Lori L. Bishop, Judith Carlson, Barbara Glenn, Linda Hammond, and Tulsa Harrison.

Also on view will be artworks by Edith A. Isidoro-Mills, Sheree Jensen, Denise Johnson, Dick Keller, Gwynne Matlavage, Kori Meyer, Larry Neel, Michelle Nelsen, Marie Nygren, Sara Wharton Riggle, Kimberly Rowlett, Jaime Sammons, Kevin Sammons, Patricia Kupferer Sammons and Suzie Slaybaugh.

Books to read

Michael Branch teaches in the Literature and the Environment Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. His latest book is “Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness” (Roost Books).

It is a candid, intimate exploration of Nevada’s high desert wilderness where Branch, his wife and two daughters have chosen to live in a home of their own design.

He does a beautiful job of conjuring the realities of life in this all too familiar, to us, landscape and seamlessly blends evocative musings on parenting with the natural history of our area. There are tales of family gardens and wily pack rats conveyed in prose that is serious as well as humorous and sarcastic at the same time. As Gary Snyder has suggested, it is a book that “points forward not back.”

Wildness of a different kind can be found in “Soho Sins” (Hard Case Crime) by Richard Vine. It’s the debut novel by the managing editor of one of the leading art world publications, “Art in America.”

It is set in a world that Vine knows well, the downtown Soho, New York gallery scene, of the late 1990s. One of the prime players in that world is found murdered in her loft and immediately thereafter her husband confesses to shooting her.

And, as in all good fairly dark, noir (which the cover promises to deliver), things are not what they first seem to be. The husband may have been across the country in California at the time.

An art dealer takes it upon himself to try and unravel what might have really happened and plunges us into twisted and inter-woven tales of the money-driven, sex-driven art world, leading to a not-exactly anticipated plot twist at the end.

The conventions of the pulp genre are nicely conjured and well-suited to this page-turner and Vine is especially adept at blending his fictional characters with real Soho-Tribeca art world places, from the gallery laden streets of Chelsea to the Odeon the once again popular go-to dining spot evoked in the opening paragraph.

Kirk Robertson covers the arts and may be reached at news@lahontanvalleynews.com