Artists are funny folk. A lot of people go camping, but when an artist goes camping he brings along a giant fireworks-filled wooden effigy to burn. A lot of people host parties, but when artists host a party, they take over an iconic old hotel, transform the hotel rooms into miniature art galleries or installations, and then call the party a conceptual movement.
In the summer of 2007, a group of local and regional artists did (more or less) exactly that at the El Cortez Hotel, 239 W. Second St., in downtown Reno. The event was called Dada Motel. Last year, after some perfunctory debate about whether to hold it again, the event returned, this time with the name changed to Nada Motel. This week marks the third iteration of the annual artistic identity crisis. They’re calling it Nada Dada Motel, and it runs from June 18-21, again centered at the El Cortez, but also spilling into the Town House Motor Lodge across the street and smaller venues around town.
The event will feature more than 100 artists showcasing a diversity of media: paintings, photographs, sculptures, films, performances and the miscellaneous, unclassifiable varieties of art that fall between the cracks of traditional media.
Here’s some background on the name. Dada is a nonsense word first used by artists in the early 20th century to describe deliberately counterintuitive artwork—art meant to defy rational explanation. Some scholars and artists might point to the works of Salvador Dali or Marcel Duchamp as well-known and easily recognizable examples of the Dada aesthetic. Others would say that the movement started earlier and was more overtly political. Still others would say that there are no easily recognizable examples of the Dada aesthetic because such a thing doesn’t exist—Dada is anti-aesthetic. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter. Dada can mean whatever you want it to mean. For all intents and purposes, it is a meaningless word. Nada, on the other hand, quite literally means nothing.
So Nada Dada Motel is a meaningless event. If this appeals to you, then you won’t be disappointed. An event like Nada Dada Motel is really just an excuse for artists to get together and do what they do best, which is show off. Despite what some artists might tell you, all artists have one thing in common: vanity. Artists make things and do things that they hope will live on—in legend if not physical space—long after the moment of creation.
What follows is a collection of brief profiles of a handful of the dozens of artists involved with Nada Dada Motel. The format of these profiles is modeled on the cardboard cutout character bios found on the back of action figure boxes. This format is a quick and easy way to showcase the talents of the artists involved, but it also serves to poke a little fun at the ego and shameless self-promotion—not to mention the willingness to prepackage and sell—that are necessary, albeit occasionally obnoxious, parts of being an artist.
Codename: Rough and Ready
File name: Todorova, Rossitza
Birthplace: Sofia, Bulgaria
Primary artistic specialty: Pen and ink
Room number: El Cortez 407
Superpowers: “As an artist, my superpowers are that I can take a scene that you have seen … an experience that you’ve had a million times—and that is driving through Nevada—and have you look at it in a way that seems so familiar, and you cannot specifically place it.
“I do pen-and-ink drawings. Lately I’ve been working with pen-and-ink as water media, so they really have a watercolor feel to them, but they’re monochromatic, and it is work on paper. They depict highways, overpasses and Nevada—Northern Nevada specifically—the desert and manmade structures of the desert, in an abstraction.”
Weaknesses: “My kryptonite as an artist is color. There’s a book called Chromophobia … that talks about how the Western world of art thinks of color as secondary and dangerous and no matter how much time I spend with it I cannot help but have the same view myself most of the time. I find myself wanting to take color out of things and make it as simple and linear as possible, and I think that it makes me stronger. I find that when I have color around me it makes me weaker.”
Nada Dada: “I love the idea that we are in a hotel-motel that is not a hotel or a motel. It is Nada, and it is Dada. It is nothing, and it is exactly what it’s not supposed to be. You’re not supposed to visit people in their hotel rooms to do business, or to look at their work, or for them to be self-publicizing from there. A hotel room is supposed to be something private, a getaway, and here we get to invite the public to go visit a very intimate space, a space that the artist has full control of, and have them create a gallery out of something that you would never think to invite the public to. I love that it’s nothing.
“I’m sharing a room with Marian Studer. She’s a ceramicist. She teaches ceramics at Spanish Springs. So the two of us are sharing a room. She’s going to be showing her mixed media paintings and ceramics, and I’m going to be showing [my work]. And we’re going to have more of a traditional work gallery compared to some of the people that are doing performance art, etcetera. We’re trying to really show off and market our work.”
