Mikayla Whitmore: Between a Rock and a Cliff

Mikayla Whitmore

BETWEEN A AN

Known for photographs that explore the mental and physical landscapes of Southern Nevada, Mikayla Whitmore comes to the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art with a series of new works that depict “the emotional space of learning to navigate while willfully getting lost.”

By noticing unfamiliar materials in everyday settings Whitmore conjures up those aspects of our lives that go unresolved and the fallible strategies we develop to cope with them. In Between a Rock and a Cliff the artist treats photography as a process of archaeological discovery, unearthing questions about life, death, and her own queer identity.

Mikayla Whitmore is a queer artist living and working in Las Vegas. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2010 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her practice includes photography, photojournalism, and installation.

She is often entranced by the desert, ritual magic, and tropes of science fiction. She currently balances her time between her studio practice and a full-time freelance photography career, researching scorpions, and roadtripping into the desert. Whitmore has exhibited work at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Nevada, David B. Smith Gallery, Colorado,P3 Studio, Nevada, and Humble Arts Foundation. Her editorial clients include ESPN, Vox Media, Vice, Huck Magazine, and The Guardian.

The Work Shop Gallery January 13, 2020–February 8, 2020

A ROCK ND A CLIFF

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

3 Go Down Deep Seligman, Arizona, USA, 2018 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

During a road trip assignment to document a roadside cafe on Route 66, Whitmore came across this hand-painted sign reading “Go down deep.� What did it mean? The mystery caught her attention amongst all the kitsch and forced Americana scattered throughout the small town.

Later she discovered the sign was advertising a cavern or some other attraction in the area, but she never found out where it was.

She thought about the wider cultural implications of the words. Bodies are buried underground, and English-language Bibles refer to sinners being cast down into hell. Going down deep also means at some point trying to come back up, diving into an unknown abyss in order to discover something that makes sense of ourselves and existence.

4 Rock, Mirror, Cliff Panguitch Lake, Utah, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

A carefully-placed mirror reflects the transitioning sky around sunset. Usually restricted to practical indoor settings, mirrors reflect us and serve to shape our self-image. When that context is removed, the mirror becomes a jumping-off point to infinite possibilities. The absence is just as important as what can be seen.

7 Laughing When Sad Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2018 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

This ice was found in an unexpected place—the front yard gutter in a Las Vegas neighborhood.

Natural ice in the city is fleeting and rare. “By the afternoon,” writes Whitmore, “it had mostly melted away, much like the casino façades and family members lost over the passing years.

Nostalgic for a sense of home, in a place that changes identities daily.”

While the ice was still fresh the artist decorated it with food dye. She expected the lines to stay sharp, but the smiling face she drew quickly dissolved into a slightly off, very somber expression. She tried a few other shapes but “nothing felt as genuine as that face … Laughing When Sad comes from a place I think some can relate to — the feeling of having to put up a front or face to the outer world, even when we feel a completely different emotional state internally.”

8 Seven Years of Bad Luck In the Direction of Searchlight, Nevada, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

Scouting locations for an assignment, Whitmore loaded up her car with props and set out from Las Vegas in search of solitude. Heading past dry Jean Lake towards the town of Searchlight, she pulled off into the desert. The sound of gunshots and a sun-baked sign told her she had accidentally strayed near a firing range. Pressed for time, she stayed to record her presence in the landscape while guns boomed urgently in the distance and the sun pitched towards the horizon.

The mylar emergency blanket covering her face is a sign that something is wrong, but the bag in her hand is too small to offer any help. The mirror under her feet is broken and covered in sand. If we imagine it as a portal, like the other mirrors in Between a Rock and a Cliff, then it is a sealed and damaged one, unable to create a reflection. The artist describes this conflicted figure—hidden yet not hidden, wanting to be seen but hesitant about offering up her full identity—as a representation of “the duality of being queer,” which can involve “hiding your true self when out in the world as a means to survival.” She points out that the gleaming surface of the mylar is similar to the deceptive shine of pyrite, or fool’s gold.

Magic Carpet Dededo, Guam, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

While travelling to Guam to visit her partner’s family, Whitmore came across a deteriorating carpet lying over a dirt patch and soaked by the morning rain. Wondering if the rug had been left out to dry, she asked her partner’s lola (Filipino for “grandmother”) if she wanted help with it.

The woman told her the carpet was put there to use as a walkway between her and her daughter’s homes so they wouldn’t track mud inside.

Her words prompted the artist to think of the mat as a magic carpet, a passageway for safe travel. It evoked a sense of human fragility.

She imagined it as the cover of a grave or trap door, beckoning her to descend. Whitmore never lifted the carpet.

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Whitmore visited Joshua Tree, California, for the inaugural performance of Bearded and Shucked, a collaborative action created by fellow artist Aaron Sheppard. Anyone who wanted to join in could adorn themselves with marine-themed costumes and parade through the heat-stricken desert to an end point in town. She joined the performance as both a participant and documentary photographer whose photographs would, in turn, become part of the experience.

As the procession reached the main road in Joshua Tree, Whitmore looked down and saw this impression in the cracked earth, without a trace of the manhole cover or of anyone who might have taken it.

It was a fossilized record of an overlooked object, so delicate that a footstep or rain would dissolve it away.

Shadows Kept Separate Joshua Tree, California, USA, 2015 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

15 I don’t want flowers when I’m dead Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

Raised in Las Vegas, with regular family trips into the arid landscape around the city, Whitmore grew up loving desert-themed souvenirs and neon-laced color fields. The cactus in this small handmade diorama belongs to her mother. It has been displayed in the artist’s childhood home for over 25 years.

After the passing of her Aunt Joyce and some personal health issues, Whitmore and her mother discussed the ways that families can fracture after a loss. They agreed it was more important to talk honestly from day to day than to mourn when the opportunity to communicate was past.

“I don’t want flowers when I’m dead,” her mother said, “let me know you love me when I’m here.

Don’t plan on showing up to my funeral if we haven’t been communicating leading up to it.”

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Not your grandfathe

by KRIS VAGNER Mikayla Whitmore is a lifelong desert dweller. She was born and raised in Las Vegas. As a kid, she spent spring breaks getting dusty at her grandfather’s vermiculite claim near the ghost town of Gold Butte.

Now in her early 30s and 10 years out of UNLV’s art department, she mines the desert’s mythology and symbology for all it’s worth.

“I feel safe in a way, when I’m in the desert,” Whitmore said. “I also feel very aware that it’s on me to defend, to look out for myself.” That statement contains exactly the ratio of disorientation and comfort as her photographs, which depict a world that’s half observed/half invented, a proving ground of sorts, where she negotiates her place in the actual world.

Planet Whitmore has a solid core of everyday anxiety and a durable surface of gleaming, delicious, sugary coating. In one image, a dead housefly is impaled on a cactus thorn. The humor is dark. They tiny creature’s indignity is displayed front and center. And the background vies with both of those facts for attention.

For one thing, it’s a warm wash of romantic, ridingoff-into-the-sunset-orange. On the other hand, it may have you questioning what’s real. Whitmore could have happened upon this scene on a hike, or she could have set it up in a studio.

To viewers who aren’t familiar with Whitmore’s biographical details, her images might function as generalized metaphors for whichever kind of confounding experience you’re most familiar with. But for her, the worlds she invents are realms where she tries to work out some of life’s big questions.

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er’s landscape Here are a few of those biographical details. Whitmore is in her early 30s. She works as a photojournalist. She identifies as queer. She recently lost her aunt. It was the first death in the family in her parents’ generation, and the loss felt like a serious no-turning-back point, the first big step in seeing her own mortality on the horizon. She’s 5-foot-2 and looks younger than she is, and sometimes that affects how people treat her. (Her conversation with friend and fellow artist Justin Favela on his podcast The Art People is illuminating. On one hand, being a small-statured, young-looking woman means that at least one male journalist has tried to rescue her from the “burden” of carrying her own camera equipment. On the other hand, Whitmore and Favela joke about the time when playing the “lookinglike-a-13-year-old-white-girl” card came in handy.)

Whitmore’s artworks—photos, 3D installations, and performative actions in the landscape—don’t amount to declarative statements about who she is and where she fits in, but something is simmering under these sleek, bright surfaces, and I suspect it is this: It seems like she’s in the process of deciding how much space to take up in the world, how much she’s willing (or not willing) to adapt to social hypocrisies and long-held gender hierarchies, when to lay low [for] safety’s sake (“Right now, being openly queer still is scary,” she said) and when to stride right in and proclaim her own worth. (A note to male readers: Yes, feeling the need to proclaim your own worth as a working woman is still a thing, albeit less so than in previous generations. Women in art, photojournalism and just about every other field expend more effort than you do proving our basic competence.)

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When Whitmore talks about her art and her life, you can hear that her tone is unapologetic, but that non-apology is deliberate, maybe even calculated.

She flat-out called herself “a queer adult who understands that I’m amazing.” As someone old enough to remember when a woman using either of those adjectives would have been sauntering toward career suicide, I am practically standing on the sidelines shaking pompoms for her. I’ve only recently become acquainted with her work, and I’m already eager to follow the trajectory of her career.

Maybe her pictures don’t look like assertively queer, feminist art on the surface, but keep an eye out for whatever she’s making and an ear out for whatever she’s talking about. There’s a good chance you’ll start to see this world she constructs as exactly the right place to really get a grasp on queer, feminist takes on things you maybe didn’t even think there were queer, feminist takes on. And I won’t be surprised if she ends up putting a less gendered touch on the tradition of American land art, recasting it as something other than the macho competitions with nature á la Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer.

A venue made for experiments It’s fitting that Whitmore’s current show, Between a Rock and a Cliff, is in the Work Shop Gallery, a hallway gallery that opened in December 2019 inside UNLV’s Barrick Museum. “Las Vegas doesn’t have a lot of testing-ground space like this,” Whitmore said.

“Normally, you get a show and it has to be super polished. You don’t get to throw around ideas or do something that’s out of your wheelhouse. Traditionally

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I do installations, but most of my main bodies of work that take off have been photo-specific. I’m struggling with that weird line. People see me as a photographer, not an artist.”

The show contains a wall of photographs on metallic paper and a few installation pieces. One of them, “Pennants and Penance,” is made up of strings of shiny gold triangular flags. Whitmore explains it as an exercise in unpacking a Catholic upbringing and 12 years of catechism. There’s a palpable difference, she said, between “how good religion is supposed to make you feel and how shitty it can make you feel.”

She described a piece that she conceived last-minute to adapt to the space: “In the front of the museum, by the bathrooms, they have this fire extinguisher box that has been there forever, that is non functional.” She gold-leafed a hammer and hung it floating in the box, behind glass. “When you look at it, it’s this beautiful object,” she said. But the arrangement is also a catch 22. In an emergency, you’d need the hammer to break the glass, but you’d need to break the glass to access the hammer. It’s just about a perfect visual metaphor for an artist whose entire MO revolves around how to claim space in the world.

Originally published in Double Scoop ARTS IN NEVADA January 21, 2020

20 Ships That Pass Into the Night Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

Whitmore created the illusion of a floating portal by setting a mirror adrift in her parents’ swimming pool. Like many of her photographs, this image was taken while the artist was without a permanent studio. Unable to rely on studio effects, she produces temporary real-life compositions by introducing unexpected materials to otherwise everyday environments. The dizzying reflection of the midday sun on the water mimics the depiction of desert mirages in movies and TV shows.

The sky reflected in the mirror takes on the appearance of an astrological space.

Thinking of ways to talk about existence and death with her six year old niece, Whitmore remembers her own childhood encounters with the hallucinatory make-believe of Magic Eye puzzle books and tie-dyed shirts.

She imagines the timeless fantasy world of childhood shattered by the realization that everything ends. Each child eventually realizes that we do not have an adequate frame of reference for our own mortality. Our finite lives are confronted by the only infinite thing, death.

An Expensive Place to Die Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

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Born and raised in Lasv Vegas, a city that thrives on calculated illusions, Whitmore is interested in the spaces between fiction and reality.

This diorama contrasts the artificial scale of the reflective tombstones with the presence of genuine earth. Museum gloves, whose baggy forms suggest Mickey Mouse hands, keep the tombstones upright, perhaps prompting the viewer to ask questions about what they might be memorializing and why this spot should be privileged with so much attention. The scene is bathed in an apocalyptic light. An Expensive Place to Die came in part from Whitmore’s collaborative work with Las Vegas artists Mary Sabo and Karin Q. Miller.

Three circular mirrors stand on a hillside in the desert. Stuck in the dirt, they nonetheless suggest a rolling movement. Whitmore imagines them as portals that offer divergent views of the future. Choosing one option over the other two can alter your life forever.

The artist suggests that her childhood memories of gamblers playing slot machines in Las Vegas grocery stores might have influenced the way she visualizes the idea of choice. On the other hand, it could have been the more universal experience of watching The Price is Right with her mom.

Thinking of the firing range near the slope where she took the photograph, she sees a connection between her arrangement of mirrors and the rows of glass bottles that people at the firing range like to use as targets.

In Case of Emergency In the Direction of Searchlight, Nevada, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

27 On My Own Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2019 Archival metallic print 20 x 30 inches

Whitmore was surprised to find this uncharacteristically clumsy fly impaled on a cactus spine in her parents’ backyard.

Not wanting to disturb a composition that nature had arranged for her, she put a paper backdrop behind the cactus to create a makeshift outdoor studio.

The artist knew she would never find out how the fly ended up like this. She tried to imagine a strong wind that might have blown the insect into the plant, or even a cheeky spirit making a game out of mortality. To the photographer, this act of fate looked like a poetic gesture.

Pennants/Penance, 2019 Rope, gold metallic fabric, glue, weight

Refusing to believe that her queer identity was a sin, Whitmore came to terms with her Catholic upbringing by forging an independent path to selfacceptance. She searches for answers to her questions about life while keeping an open mind towards concepts that have not yet been explained.

30 Exit Strategy, 2019 Hammer, gold paint, gold Mylar, spotlight 29.5 x 29.5 inches

The fire extinguisher cabinet—a small theatrical space that promises to rescue anyone who obeys its simple instruction, “Break Glass” – speaks to Mikayla Whitmore’s method of using dioramas and miniatures in her practice.

It reflects her interest in moments of anxiety and crisis, those times when we are assessing our exit strategies in case an emergency happens, while simultaneously feeling underprepared and recognizing that time can’t be stopped. The hammer is physically close to us but the glass barrier removes it into the realm of a cinematic mirage, the promise of a salvation that has become paradoxically attainable and impossible.

The theatricality of the spectacle reminds us that, ultimately, the responsibility for enacting a rescue will be placed on ourselves.

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The museum would like to thank Mikayla Whitmore for her willingness to embark on this experimental project. Between a Rock and a Cliff was produced with the valuable assistance of Paige Bockman, LeiAnn Huddleston, and the Executive Director of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Alisha Kerlin.

DK Sole worked with the artist on the label text and the catalog was designed by Chloe Bernardo. Thank you to Shahab Zargari for his videography. To R.C. Wonderly and the Makerspace for their exhibition support. Thank you to Kris Vagner of Double Scoop and Nicholas Russell of Hyperallergic for writing about the exhibition. And to the UNLV College of Fine Arts, and Dean Nancy J. Usher for her leadership.

The artist would like to extend additional thanks to Mary Sabo and Karin Q. Miller for collaborating with her on the project that included the photograph An Expensive Place to Die.

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MARJORIE BARRICK MUSEUM OF ART Alisha Kerlin Paige Bockman DK Sole LeiAnn Huddleston Javier Sanchez Chloe Bernardo Dan Hernandez DESIGNED BY

Chloe Bernardo

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IN CASE OF FIRE BREAK GLASS