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Large-scale art project in desert set to open to public

Travelers zooming along Interstate 15 to and from Las Vegas tend to concentrate on the destination, not the desert.

But all that may be changing, as a new vision looms off the highway near Jean Dry Lake.

The seven stacked rock totems, glowing in vibrant fluorescent colors, resemble a smaller Stonehenge with a Day-Glo paint job.

But it’s no desert mirage — or hallucination.

It’s “Seven Magic Mountains,” Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s large-scale environmental art project, which opens to the public at sunrise Wednesday for a two-year run — less than half the time it took to create.

The site — 10 miles south of the Las Vegas Boulevard-St. Rose Parkway intersection — may seem isolated, but it’s in the neighborhood where, in the 1960s, such artists as Michael Heizer and Jean Tinguely created significant sculptures.

 

Rondinone “drove up and down Las Vegas Boulevard South and stopped at so many locations,” notes consultant Sandra Fairchild, who helped shepherd the more-than-$3 million project.

Along with the proximity to past land art sites, “what drew him to that particular spot,” Fairchild adds, was its location “across from the last spike set in 1905” by the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad — which led to the founding of Las Vegas.

“It is a great spot,” agrees Rondinone representative Matt Nelson, who supervised the shaping of the project’s rock totems at a quarry near Apex. (More about that later.)

When searching for the perfect site, Rondinone and his associates “went up and down” the road until the artist “actually said, ‘this is the spot,’ ” Nelson recalls.

But the road to “Seven Magic Mountains” really begins in New York City, five years ago, when the Art Production Fund “invited Ugo to do a project in Las Vegas” along I-15, APF co-founder Doreen Remen recalls.

The nonprofit APF, which Remen co-founded with colleague Yvonne Force Villareal, has funded a variety of public art projects, some of them at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas — including those at the resort’s now-closed P3 Studio.

“Las Vegas just presents such an interesting backdrop for art,” Remen says in a telephone interview from New York. And a project situated alongside I-15 would mean “something that’s accessible physically, but in this remote landscape.”

APF chose Rondinone because “his work speaks to people,” she adds. “It’s relatable and moving” and “deals with universal issues,” making it “something you encounter in an intuitive way. It speaks to nature, it speaks to our relationship to nature” and “our awe of nature.”

With its Day-Glo palette and road-to-Vegas location, however, “Seven Magic Mountains” also addresses “our desire to alter nature,” Remen says, noting that the project “opens your mind and allows you to start asking questions about, ‘what is beauty?’ ”

Because the project site is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, APF opted to partner with Reno’s Nevada Museum of Art to produce the project — and coordinate with BLM (and, later, Clark County) officials during the extended development process.

The Reno museum, home to the Center for Art + Environment, is “very interested, as we say around here, in art that walks in the world,” executive director David Walker says. “It’s less interesting to stay inside white-cube galleries” than focus on “works that are often monumental in scale.”

And, with totems towering from 25 to 35 feet high, “Seven Magic Mountains” definitely lives up to the term “monumental.”

A visit to Las Vegas Paving’s quarry near Apex — where “Seven Magic Mountains” took shape — confirms its massive presence.

The boulders used to build the totems were sourced, shaped, assembled and painted at the quarry over a period of months.

LVP employees — who are used to crushing 2- to 3-foot rocks — spent more than a year collecting dozens of oversize limestone boulders, some more than 50,000 pounds, for “Seven Magic Mountains.”

They photographed 50 to 60 of them, then emailed the images to Rondinone for his reaction, according to project manager Danny Fitzgerald.

“We saved a lot of travel expenses to Switzerland,” he says, adding that Rondinone’s first visit to the Apex site, in August 2015, proved “brutal” for the artist because of the 115-degree heat. “He definitely had to tough that one out.”

Rondinone’s original designs “were more pyramid-based,” Fitzgerald notes, “but now it’s boulder stacking,” with LVP employees using diamond saws to smooth and flatten the tops and bottoms of the giant stones that make up the totems.

Fabricating the totems has given LVP employees “a new meaning to getting stoned,” master builder John Warren jokes. “I’m actually honored to work on it.”

A 4-inch steel rod holds each totem’s boulders together; pre-cast concrete foundations, buried in the desert, hold the totems in place at the exhibit site.

“The rocks are bolted to the base and bolted to each other,” explains Warren. “They’re like Tinker Toys or Legos.”

Except that these giant stacks — occupying the symbolic territory between stark desert and glittery Las Vegas — deliver far more food for thought, Walker suggests.

“No matter what your interest in contemporary art, go see it and spend time with it,” he says. “Besides a beautiful artistic gesture, it creates in the desert an otherworldly, contemplative experience to be had.”

At least that’s been his experience in the run-up to “Seven Magic Mountains’ ” debut.

“It’s more breathtaking than I could have imagined,” Walker says. “It truly is a spiritual experience, standing next to one of these totems.”

Read more from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.

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