Brian Swanson neon museum boneyard drawings
Las Vegas Weekly: Optic Nerve “Everywhere a Sign” by Chuck Twardy
The Planned Neon Museum Shows off the signs of our times.
Building signs seem such ephemeral objects, particularly in this most ephemeral of towns, that it’s hard to believe they are designed. It’s as if they occur as airily as the pedestrians and cars on an architect’s rendering.
They also seem to defy substantiality, like a drawing’s highlights. We know intellectually that a stardust sign is a physical object, but its very essence is the illusion, however stylized, of stars hovering in the sky. So it is grounding to visit The Art of the Sign, at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery. By the gallery entrance hangs the blueprint for the Stardust sign, the detailed roadmap of its tangible construction. Nearby stands the actual G from the Golden Nugget sign, its sheet-metal surface irregularly dotted with electric bulbs, some working, some not.
The discrepancy between the aspiration and the reality of the matter is captured in yet portion of the sign show, a sequence of “Drawings from the Boneyard” by Brian Swanson. These pen-and-ink drawings offer incongruous and abstracted views of the museum’s salvage. Swanson zooms in on the sequence “ndma” that once proclaimed, literally, a “landmark.”