Goldmining is a double media 2-D installation that combines the practice of smartphone photography and traditional painting; the project explores themes of vision in the digital age, reality, personality, and the poetics of the mundane.
The installation consists of medium-sized paintings and small photo prints. The printed photographs are a selection of candid shots taken as references for paintings. The lack of compositional finesse creates a blurring of the lines between the mediums of painting and photography. This juxtaposition is meant to create a sense of time-out, reflection, and meditation. The lifelong project is to always be “goldmining” the visual field for moments of unexpected visual poetry, to then enhance and distill these passages in intimately painted works. The paintings are concerned with the truth of mark-making, color composition, and proportional format.
Hidalgo explores painting’s unique textural properties and illusory characteristics of the figure-ground relationship. His points of focus are color, material properties, and perception. In the artist's works, form is made to circulate through systems and rules of picture-making that allow improvisation. An example of one such system is his tracing of forms from movie projections onto canvases; the randomly traced lines creating all-over compositions that exchange present day notions (media consumption) with abstract expressionism, textile pattern design, geometry, optical illusions, and nature. “Goldmining” through endless smartphone photos for visual poetry is another such picture-making system.
Homero Hidalgo was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and migrated to Miami as a teenager. He moved to the Bay Area to complete a bachelor’s degree in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. He recently earned an MFA degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where his interest focused on painting, abstraction and public art. His early work is included in private and public collections such as the Denver Art Museum, the Snite Museum of Art in Notre Dame, IN, and he has been featured in international exhibits such as Pach Pan in 2019 at DiabloRosso in Panama City, Panama. He lives and works in Las Vegas where he co-owns Available Space Art Projects (ASAP), an artist-run project space for local art. He has completed public work installations and murals for private residences, Clark County, the City of Las Vegas, and the City of Henderson.
This program/project was supported, in part, by the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the state of Nevada.
On exhibit at Laughlin Library from February 2, 2025 through April 12, 2025
Monday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Tuesday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Wednesday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Thursday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Friday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
Saturday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
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