Venetian Bellagio Palace: An Ode to Las Vegas

Caroline Anderson, Charles Caesar Lev Pinkus Victoria Reshetnikov Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip They say Vegas is dying. In the face of endless beige organic wine, padded listening rooms that drip-drop a smug sense of performed connoisseurship, while we “quiet quit” in “quiet luxury” - Las Vegas and what it embodies just might save us from ourselves. Do we really not want to see The Sphinx, visit the Temple at Luxor, or feel the mist of the Trevi Fountain for 50% off? Why is a simulacra of a farmstead dining experience in the middle of Nolita more enticing than a simulacra of the ancient city of Venice in the middle of the desert? Do the wildly colorful theaters of Vegas shine too bright a spotlight on the nature-toned preachers of the commercialized self-care pulpit? Las Vegas, and all its aesthetic American grandiosity, is a synthetic environment that speaks human truths. It’s a story of American hope, optical illusion, aesthetic density, and the belief that one glimmering moment might change our lives forever. It’s a city made from the same impulse that brought us all to NYC, to try our luck. Like New York, like Venice, like South Beach, like Hollywood, like all of us artists working through the night - if your lights are on, you are alive. Caroline Anderson’s (Cincinnati, OH & Austin, TX) sculptures appear like alien bustiers and showgirl headdresses made for non-human performers. Caroline’s broad artistic practice explores technology, deep time, and near-future speculation. She is an Asst. Professor of AI and Creative Practice at The University of Texas, and founded Solar Noon Gallery in Cincinnati. Charles Caesar (NYC) is a Florida native and longtime New Yorker who works as an artist, writer, and zine publisher - creating imagery that celebrates the timelessness and magical realism of the elevated-everyday. Charles’ photographs and works on view capture the glamour, aspiration, and resilience of show business. Lev Pinkus’s (NYC) paintings appear like flattened disco balls, hypnotizing us with magic and laden with messages encoded in crystalline longitudinal color charts. The tediousness in this work reminds us that glamour is constructed, and escapism is designed. Victoria Reshetnikov (NYC) is an interdisciplinary artist interested in urban human-to-architectural relationships. Their work hovers between printmaking, sculpture, photography and drawing, and are united in their depictions of physical and psychological interior space. Eric Santoscoy-McKillip’s (NYC) work examines place and identity through the use of colors and symbols that reflect the in-between place of the US-Mexico borderlands. Eric’s works on view appear like desert signage. His colored stucco reliefs possess both a maximal and minimal visual language, bringing a textured lens to a land that is fleeting, shifting, and changing.

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