Artist goes nuclear with NMA exhibit

Chris Drury is British, but that hasn't stopped him from creating an insightful commentary on land use and natural resources in America.

In "Mushrooms/Clouds," a new exhibit running through Oct. 5 at the Nevada Museum of Art, Drury considers such things as Nevada's nuclear heritage and water appropriation. His mediums range from sculpture and wall paintings to video and photography, and several of his pieces were created in cooperation with non-arts organizations, including the Desert Research Institute.

Because his work usually relates to place, Drury often creates pieces in public environments and natural settings, but the NMA exhibit allows people to delve into his work in a gallery setting. The show is his first major solo exhibition in a U.S. museum, and Drury said he was thrilled with the opportunity to work here.

"I love Nevada," he said. "Last year I went to Antarctica, and Antarctica's a desert. I had this wish to go to a hot desert, and then I got an invitation to come here. So, it's perfect really. It's the kind of landscape that appeals to me. "» It was a great opportunity to do this and to try and make this exhibition about this place and its history and its politics and its land use and all that."

Drury's work at the NMA ranges from a large rock shelter made out of 559 stones to a floating mushroom cloud built from sagebrush and monofilament. There are multiple meanings behind every work. With the shelter, for instance, the 559 stones represent the number of genes in the partial DNA sequence of a soil bacteria from Frenchman's Flat at the Nevada Test Site. Clearly, the mushroom cloud references the test site as well, but its sagebrush makeup brings other elements of Nevada to mind.

"There are all sorts of layers in this work and they all relate," Drury said. "Maybe you have to find these connections in this exhibition."

The exhibit also includes representations of mushroom spores -- both photographic and painted -- something Drury has worked with for some time. Although these pieces don't relate solely to Nevada, they tie to the exhibit and our area nicely.

"With the test site, because I've been making work about mushrooms and clouds for so many years, it just seemed like an ideal context to use those works and to push them in new directions," Drury said. "Also because the mushroom has to do with the life and death cycle because mushrooms recycle dead material back into soil from which we grow our plants and etcetera."

Along with pieces created inside the museum, Drury took his art outdoors. For instance, he created a piece called "Winnemucca Whirlwind" by raking a massive pattern into the soil at Winnemucca Dry Lake, near the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation. That piece of art was created in conjunction with the Pyramid Lake Museum/Visitor Center and the NMA and the hope was that it would remain intact for months. Unfortunately, thunderstorms and bad weather have mostly destroyed it. But that's what happens with environmental art, said Nevada Museum of Art curator of exhibitions and collections Ann Wolfe.

Although Drury is not a household name in Reno, Wolfe says it's a treat to have an artist of his stature working on an in-depth project in Nevada.

"He's very well respected around the world," she said. "He's acknowledged by major art publications and just really one of the foremost thinkers in this kind of art."