NV AWE: Tiny Treasures: Nevada Women NVAwe

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Truckee Meadows Community College Workshop Participants Wrap up NV AWE: Tiny Treasures Project

For a year, we have been creating these little NV AWE discs for a fundraiser for DoubleScoop at RTIA 2024. TMCC folks finished up the remaining discs and we are now officially finished. I can't wait to see them all displayed in September! - Candace

Here is what Micaela Rubalcava wrote about the discs she finished up: I love the playdough texture of the first layer on two of the discs made by children and the geometric shapes on the first layer of the other two discs. Those first layers made me think about interactions, harmonious and strained, between cultures, people, and animals in our high desert environment. I added high desert animals I've seen in Reno: brown rabbits, a frog, a tortoise. One rabbit leaps over a fence, posing a fairy tale question inspired by the child artist who made the fence and my own adult musings as I develop children's literature curriculum for this academic year: Is the rabbit going from the wilderness into someone's yard, or escaping a yard for freedom in the wilderness? Why? Is this rabbit trying to partake in someone's vegetable garden or escaping a trap? I imagine a happy little frog jumping for joy atop a mountain. I imagine a rabbit wanting to talk to the tortoise as both negotiate an urban skyscape. Another rabbit sprints between mountains purposefully, fleeing a foe or meeting a friend?

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

High Desert

We were born and raised in northern Nevada and have a strong connection to this place as home. Although generations apart, we grew up in Nevada’s high desert elevations. This place is ingrained in us. It’s easy to imagine that our tough-girl attitudes about working hard and being resilient have been passed down to both of us through the generations of our families that came before us, enduring to make Nevada their home.

We first met and developed a connection over ten years ago at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the sculpture studio. Though we have stayed in touch over the years, we hadn’t collaborated until now. The resulting piece emerged from a mutual appreciation for each other’s visual sensibilities and resonates with our shared origins.

Without a doubt, the high desert has influenced our reductive visual aesthetic, our deliberate use of color, our attraction to raw natural materials, and our fascination with found things that possess history. There is a certain poetics to all of it. Blanketing bare surfaces with felt, sewing the sky to the land, and casting rugged thistle into delicate porcelain are all gestures full of meaning.

Kara Savant and Tamara Scronce