no-such-place…

 An exhibition of invited artists playfully exploring non-traditional approaches to the landscape genre.

In Nevada, we exist between many extremes; from blue skies every day, to freezing snow blizzards, scorching desert heat, earthquakes as tectonic plates collide, dust devils across playa, hailstorms in summer, to uncontrollable wildfires ravaging the landscape.

After these last strange years of internalization, absence from friends and excursions, living more and more through the screen, these are contemporary artists thinking about our surroundings, exploring landscapes of the imagination or no-such-places, where the mind, heart and eye can rest or dream…

Exhibiting Artists

Victoria Wagner

Julia Schwadron Marianelli

Michelle Lassaline

Sidne Teske

Scott MacLeod

Rachel Stiff

Kim Franke

Wes Lee

Teal Francis

Ahren Hertel

Galen Brown

EXHIBITING ARTISTS BIOS

Victoria Wagner

Victoria Wagner, who migrated at eighteen from the Nevada desert to Northern California, contrasts nature and industry in her gem-like sculptures, which are hand-planed from fallen coastal trees and painted with oils. Wagner also addresses this dichotomy in her installations and paintings, which explore transitions of abstracted sound and light from her surroundings. Wagner's work is physically in tune with her local landscape-she harvests the wood rocks in and around her home of Occidental, CA. Her paintings are inspired by the sun, sound, and vibrational pull of the forest while also commenting on the loss of personal reflection and direct experience in the mechanical age as natural resources are diminished by collective inaction. Wagner creates a psychedelic experience that reflects the landscape of Northern California, but also announces its darker and less romantic side.
-Heather Marx, curator

Victoria’s paintings, sculptures and murals have been exhibited and collected internationally. Recently, her work has been featured at Sources Unlimited-Desio + Giorgetti Showroom, Mumbai, Berkeley Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, Angela Meleca, Columbus, OH, Dose Projects, Brooklyn, NY, Sarah Shepard Gallery, Larkspur, CA, Art Works, Cedar City, UT, Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA and Alfa Gallery, Miami, FL. 

Victoria has taught, advised and coordinated in multiple programs at California College of the Arts since the Fall of 2001. She loves curricular conversation and development that fosters community and defeats hierarchies that favor outdated models of exchanging and learning.  Her recent book of memoirist short stories, Boughs of Our Form, was published in 2015. 

 Victoria Wagner is represented in California by by Maybaum Gallery

Julia Schwadron Marianelli

Julia is a painter and faculty of the Fine Arts Department, and the Assistant Director for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Sierra Nevada University. Her paintings have been written about in multiple publications including The Brooklyn Rail, The Bangkok Post, and Contemporaryartdaily.com. She has shown her artwork across the country as well as internationally. She was a Visiting Professor of Painting and Artist in Residence at Chiang Mai University from 2010 - 2011, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Iowa from 2007-2009. She was a founding member of the “Matzo Files,” an artist flat file project inside Streit’s Matzo store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2004.

Julia received a Joan Mitchell fellowship in 2006. She completed her BA in Studio art at UC San Diego in 1998 and her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2004.

She currently lives and works in South Lake Tahoe with her husband and two kids.

Julia Schwadron Marianelli is represented by Melhop Gallery º7077

Michelle Lassaline

Michelle Lassaline is an interdisciplinary performance artist; her work is based in drawing, sewing, and storytelling. Lassaline has performed for the Nevada Museum of Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Holland Project, among others. She has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the City of Seattle, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and the Nevada Arts Council, and she is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the Maine College of Art and Design. Lassaline was raised in Carson City, Nevada, spent the formative years of her art practice in Reno, then moved to the Pacific Northwest where she now lives on an island in the Salish Sea on the unceded indigenous lands of the Coast Salish people.

Sidne Teske

Primarily working with soft pastels, Sidne Teske paints on location (en plein aire), portraying her landscape with vibrant energy. When weather makes it too difficult to explore the outdoors, Teske turns to her studio easel to create large expressive works that feature the human figure. Teske is largely self-taught although she has taken a few workshops over the span of her career, and she continues to attend life drawing sessions when she can.

Teske has received many awards and honors. In 2017 she was commissioned by the Nevada Arts Council to make three works to be awarded to the Governor, the Nevada State Assembly and the Nevada State Senate in recognition for their parts in creating the Nevada Arts Council 50 years prior (1967). In 2014 Nevada Humanities commissioned Teske to make 14 pieces for presentation to organizations and individuals who had made a difference in the arts in Nevada.

Also in 2014 she was awarded a mentorship by the Nevada Chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) to study under Caldecott Award-winning illustrator David Diaz. She was the State of Nevada representative at the Folklife Festival on the Mall for the Smithsonian Institution in 2005. She created the Nevada Governor's Arts awards that were presented in 2004, and a poster she designed for the Bureau of Land Management and Nevada Rock Art Association won first place at the National Competition of the Society of American Archaeologists in 2003.

Teske's works are to be found in numerous collections, including Renown Hospital in Reno, NV, Interlachen in Colorado, Embassy Suites at South Shore Lake Tahoe, and Harrah's High Roller Suite at South Shore, Lake Tahoe.

Scott MacLeod

Writer and artist Scott MacLeod has been presenting live, time-based, media, conceptual and/or static work in the Bay Area and internationally since 1979.

His installations and paintings have been exhibited locally at Southern Exposure, The Lab, Intersection for the Arts, Build and numerous other venues, and internationally in the Czech Republic, Belgium, England, Italy and Germany.

MacLeod’s writings have been widely published in the USA and, in translation, in Russia, Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic.

His conceptual/literary projects include The Imagined Gallery and The Institute for Study & Application, Kohoutenberg.

He has presented over 100 performances in 13 countries and co-produced several international cultural exchange projects between USA, France, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

Visual arts awards include the San Francisco Art Institute’s Adaline Kent Award (2000) and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Visual Arts Award (2001).

His work is archived at the Avant Writing Collection of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University, Columbus and the Experimental Writing Collection of University at Buffalo, New York, and collected by The Contemporary Museum, Hawai’I, The Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, and over 200 private collectors.

Rachel Stiff

Rachel Stiff is a painter and art educator based in Carson City, Nevada. She was born into a small ranching community in rural Montana where she grew up. Stiff holds an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson (2012) and a BFA from the University of Montana in Missoula (2009). Her work has been shown throughout the West and acquired by the Emmy award winning studio, Traktor Films of Santa Monica, CA. In 2013, Stiff was selected by RAID Projects for a three-month artist residency in downtown Los Angeles. After living and working in the city intermittently for two years, Stiff moved to Nevada to work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum. Stiff was a featured artist in the exhibition 'Tilting the Basin', shown by the Nevada Museum Art in Reno and Las Vegas. In 2017, a series of Stiff's paintings were included in "The Nuclear Landscape” exhibition, in conjunction with the NV STEAM Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art. Identifying as a true Westerner, her work examines the construction of the modern landscape and desert-urban interface through abstraction.

Kimbo Franke

Kimbo Franke was born in Sacramento, California and raised in Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada. She returned to the Tahoe region after living in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area and for the better part of her life, has made Lake Tahoe her home. She has had an interest in art from an early age, ambidextrously drawing and feverishly doodling in her youth, and has since engaged in creative pursuits both professionally and personally. Having attended University of Nevada Reno with a focus on art before pursuing an Interior Design education and career, she developed a deep connection to the visual arts. Because of this, Kimbo continues to forge an understanding of the relationship between nature and expression. She considers herself to be both a plein air and studio painter, with each discipline allowing her to explore and interpret a sense of place in natural, rural and urban settings. Her enthusiasm for community and art has led her to serve as board president and board member of North Tahoe Arts, committee chair for North Lake Tahoe Plein Air Open and Festival, juror for Tahoe Mountain Show art exhibition/competition, as well as panelist for First Lady Presents Arts Initiative for the State of Nevada.

Wes Lee

 Weston Lee grew up in Norco, a previously small town in southern California. In college he studied art at Sonoma State University and at Cal State University, Fullerton, earning a B.A. in Art at Fullerton with an emphasis in drawing and painting. Recently, he returned to school and completed his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nevada, Reno graduating in 2021. Lee was the recipient of the Graduate Dean’s Merit Scholarship Award at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2018, the Frances S. Gignoux Liberal Art Scholarship in 2019 and the Sierra Arts Endowment Grant from Sierra Arts Foundation, Reno in 2006.

In creating his art, his process of working involves responding to initial marks and abstract shapes rather than starting with a set plan, allowing the making of his compositions to be a process of discovery and exploration as he creates imaginary spaces inspired by nature’s organic forms, textures, and interwoven connections. 

He dreams in downtown Reno, Nevada in his live/work studio next to the Truckee River.

Teal Francis

Teal Francis grew up in Central Oregon and has a Bachelor of Arts in studio art from Colorado College and a Master of Fine Arts in visual art from the University of Nevada, Reno. In her creative work, Teal is interested in questioning our societal orientations through humor, play, and simplicity; she primarily works in woodcut and screen printing, painting, paper mache, and sewing.

Teal's background is primarily in community arts, and includes working as a studio assistant for Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle and organizing and leading a community group of printmakers in Reno. During her master's program, Teal managed the art department's printmaking lab, worked promoting and facilitating University arts events, and taught undergraduate courses in drawing and printmaking.

Teal currently resides in Fairbanks, Alaska and works for Fairbanks Arts Association.

Ahren Hertel

Ahren Hertel was born in Ft. Collins, Colorado. His father’s job as an exploration geologist moved the family between Chile, Bolivia and Reno, Nevada. Hertel attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia where he received his BFA in Illustration in 2002. He later received his MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2009. Interested largely in environmental issues, his work consists of both landscape and figurative work. He has displayed his paintings in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, including “Tilting the Basin” at the Nevada Museum of Art and “Match” at Oats Park Art Center in Fallon, NV. He received the Nevada Arts Council 2012 Visual Arts Fellowship Grant, among other awards. Currently he is an Instructor in the Department of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno and a working artist.

Galen Brown

Galen Brown was born in Reno in 1959 and raised in both Reno and at King’s Beach, Lake Tahoe. He was a dedicated junior ski racer on the Reno Falcons ski team and later the Lake Tahoe Ski Club, and a quiet loner in school who lacked direction until a ski accident rendered him immobile for six months. He began drawing from his bed while healing.

Brown commenced classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and stayed for the duration of his formal art education, earning a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 1988 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1990. He continued studying in China and New York, and for the following 20 years Brown resisted selling his work to collectors, preferring to keep his bodies of work together. 

In 2019 the Nevada Museum of Art installed his solo exhibition Sine Cere, across 3 of their expansive gallery spaces and purchased Sine Cere, the title piece, one of the large 8 foot radius circle drawings for their permanent collection.

A large body of Brown’s work was featured in Tilting the Basin, the Nevada Museum of Art survey exhibition of contemporary artists working in the state of Nevada in 2016, which also traveled to a second Museum location in Las Vegas in 2017. His work is also in the permanent collection of the Nevada Arts Council, and the newly founded Clear Creek Collection at Lake Tahoe.

The quality of Brown’s work was acknowledged with the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation artist’s award in 2017.

Galen Brown is represented by Melhop Gallery º7077