Deon & Trish Reynolds “WestStops” Photography Exhibition at Western Folklife Center and Throughout Downtown Elko
By David Roche
Driving west down Idaho Street in Elko, Nevada, and entering the central district at 4th Street, the unsuspecting traveler is suddenly confronted with a grazing trio of horses languidly munching in a rustic corral. Not in the flesh, mind you. A large 7 by 17-foot black and white photo mural, plastered on the plywood siding of a boarded up building puts the driver into instant time warp. Further down the street, in an alley behind the Pioneer Hotel, a calf roping cowboy bears down with lariat flying. Out on 5th Street, a steam engine on the wall of the Western Folklife Center peeks out toward Railroad Avenue where the real trains once ran. What’s going on?
The downtown corridor of Elko has long been subject to the blight of empty storefronts, most recently along Idaho Street. To address the problem with ideas developed through creative placemaking projects and techniques from other similar street artworks, the Western Folklife Center, through the support of the Nevada Energy Foundation and ArtPlace America (and the generous permissions of Pedro Ormaza and Mike Reynolds), commissioned Reynolds Photography to produce these photographic images for outdoor wall installation.
A work-in-progress entirely dependent on weather conditions, wall surface composition and the viscosity of the cream-of-wheat paste used to glue the photo paper to the walls, Reynolds Photography and Western Folklife Center volunteers have been busy attaching and re-attaching images that change the feel of the neighborhood.
Deon and Trish Reynolds, based in Eureka, NV, have been traveling the highways and byways of Nevada for more than 25 years. Deon shoots black and white panoramic images with those disposable plastic Kodak Funsaver cameras once found in drugstores everywhere but utilizing film stock {}he customizes and installs. Trish shoots her black and white photographs with a 1920s box camera. Both of them have had distinguished gallery showings of photographs and other multimedia works. Trish is a member of the Wild Women Artists group of Nevada and Deon recently stepped down after serving several years as a Nevada Arts Council board member.
Titled “WestStops,” a play on words referencing both camera aperture nomenclature and local geography, the large mural-size photographs give instant pause, a momentary visual meditation on time, timelessness and the circling ebb and flow of life, decay and continuity. Like the work of ramshackle structures of the rural South by the late William Christenberry, Reynolds Photography’s dedication to craft inspires an understanding of both the beauty and the poignancy in viewing images that may depict scenes out of place in the center of town but that magnify the current reality of empty storefronts as part of that same natural cycle of appearance and disappearance in the rural West.The patina of age extends to the cameras used and the darkroom techniques.
While ranch traditions of horses and cattle continue to the present, the steam trains are gone and ghost towns of abandoned mining towns dot the Nevada countryside, the latter replaced by major earth-moving operations. The glory days of downtown Elko—when big name bands played the Commercial Casino and the train ran right down the center of town between Commercial and Railroad streets—are past and gone. But the idea of a downtown Renaissance is always a possibility. For us at the Western Folklife Center, we have the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering to attract winter audiences and a canvas of brick and plywood on the sides of buildings on which to inscribe some of the visual stories of time and place in the second decade of the 21st century.
