Desert Companion Feature: Personal Best of the City

Best Mural I’d Like to See Transplanted to a More Prominent Place

Jw Caldwell’s “Time Heals All Wounds”

The mural by Las Vegas artist Jw Caldwell that stretched outside the Tilting the Basin exhibit on Commerce Street Downtown last year was twice as big as its first incarnation the year prior at Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, nudging the question: How big could it be? And where?

Forget, for a moment, the Downtown murals and street art. Caldwell's painting — the phrase "Time Heals All Wounds" bookended by cowboys riding dinosaurs — would be spectacular on the side of a large building along the I-15 or 215 Beltway, where they cut through town.

His humorous wordplay on existential angst is refreshingly direct, but with layers to unfold. Time Heals All Wounds (still up on Commerce Street) speaks of humility. Time may heal all wounds, but time also runs out. Time makes us extinct. The dinosaurs are long gone, and, as Caldwell says, “cowboys aren’t really a thing anymore.” We're all just riding this planet until our time is up.

But, rather than be morose, the artist's colors, style, and lettering settles instead somewhere in the realm of a calming haiku, a Johnny Cash song, or philosophical contemplation. Caldwell has a tendency to get to the meat of things that way. Chew on this, the mural seems to say, and then, Lose your illusions. But have fun, too. Kristen Peterson

JW CALDWELL’S ‘COGNITIVE DISSONANCE’ VAULTS THE DIVIDE BETWEEN TEXT AND IMAGE

JW Caldwell: Cognitive Dissonance

Walk into Rise Gallery and whammo! The expertly hung and curated show, Cognitive Dissonance, vibrates with coherent art cred and proves that JW Caldwell can paint. But what gives the show its wallop is how deftly Caldwell leaps across the word-image divide. The text in these 37 works does more than simply caption images: The words become the image itself.

For example, the small-format diptych “A Brief Rumination on the Expediency of Deterioration” presents a cockroach and the word “bad” on the left, and a herd of nine roaches and “worse” on the right. (The missing “to” in “bad to worse” is implicit in the “two” works-on-paper.) The words—painted in a rounded, lower-case cursive—mimic the roach trail that continues from one work to the next, uniting the textual elements in a single toothpaste-ish stream with subtle fecal associations. Text becomes image, and the image recalls the fact that roaches defecate chemicals to communicate—their trail is their language. The red color of the cursive script piques the creepy emotions associated with the insects, while the muted splotched ground humorously suggests the messy, and scatological, dimensions of eating and art-making.

“Straight to Voicemail,” too, simultaneously delivers and undercuts its message with wit. In this medium-format canvas, “love is a lie” is painted in an all-cap graffiti font dominating the canvas. The hearts-and-valentines colors—muted fleshy pink and bruised mauve—are at odds with the damning content. The cracked and decomposing stone letters combined with the faux-marble backdrop suggest the relationship is in ruins. Yet in the “Voicemail” foreground, a pink, pudgy kitty—the queen of memes—appears ready for a make-up cuddle. Or is it? The cat image partially obscures the letters in the word “lie,” drawing attention to the cover-up and implicating itself in the ruse. Given that the message is going “straight to voicemail,” the cat might symbolize abandonment, which would account for its slightly startled expression.

While Caldwell’s Disney works are perhaps less accomplished, the pieces in which text transforms into image lend themselves to a rich array of tongue-in-cheek interpretations. Both the comic mountain sheep series and the shark series feature letters whose shapes vie with legibility for the upper hand; both series are painted to look like prints, emphasizing the tromp-l’oeil current in the exhibition. Overall, the works in Cognitive Dissonance expose disconnects between words and their meanings by subverting the mainstream canon of representation. In doing so, they draw attention to the way pop culture unconsciously permeates our thoughts. All the more reason to make a conscious decision to see the show before it closes.

Hot Seat Lead | art

Jw Caldwell

The ebulliently “negative” paintings of a singular Vegas artist.

Here now a few words from the cognitive dissident pictured above, Jw Caldwell, one of the city’s most bearded, sweetly irascible, and deservedly beloved artists. His distinctive canvases wring their own mojo from the text-and-image tradition of your Ed Ruschas and Wayne Whites, but lit with color explorations he credits to the effect of living here. His first solo exhibit in years, Cognitive Dissonance, opens this month in the Rise Gallery in Holsum Lofts.

MY WORK is more tongue-in-cheek nihilism, if there is such a thing.

Jw IS my real name; I’d like to get that out there. That’s what it says on my birth certificate.

THIS SHOW will be the usual: pretty heavily text-based, a lot of animal imagery, a lot of inside jokes, bumper-sticker philosophy. I’ve been looking through the work a lot lately, and it’s all pretty negative. (Laughs.) But, like I say, in a tongue-in-cheek nihilism way.

I’M WORKING on an image that involves a hammerhead shark and the saying, “When you’re a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” It’s basically about headaches. The meaning will be there, you just have to peel the onion a little to find it.

PEOPLE HAVE said I complain too much, and I say, “Stop making it so easy!”

I WANT it to be accessible. Art is a visual form of communication, so if I can relay my intentions to you in a more direct way, then it works.

A LOT of times, the phrase comes first — I’ll pick it up from something I’ve read, a conversation, song lyrics. I’ll latch onto a phrase, ascribe a meaning to it, then try to tweak it. What does this mean, what can it mean? And then the image will often follow pretty rapidly after that.

I DON’T believe in perfection; I like to see the artist’s hand. All the letters are hand-done — I don’t use a computer; I rarely use a straight edge. I like to see little fluctuations and flaws. (Laughs.) Sometimes you can tell how hungover I was when I painted it.

THERE’S USUALLY a punch line in there that I want you to get, or get close to.

Cognitive dissonance Jan. 2-30, Rise Gallery in Holsum Lofts. Opening reception, 6-9p, Jan. 2