Artist Brian Tolle will host a lecture at 7 p.m. Oct. 14 in UNLV's Classroom Building Complex, Room A-108 on the UNLV campus. The lecture is part of the UNLV Art Department's 2003 Visiting Artist Program, which is coordinated by art professor Robert Wysocki. The lecture, made possible by funding from the City of Las Vegas Arts Commission, is free and open to the public.
Tolle's work greatly reflects his fascination with American history. His particular interest is in the gray areas between the past and present. He received a B.A. in political science from SUNY at Albany (1986), B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design (1992), and a M.F.A. from Yale University (1994). Tolle's first solo exhibit came just two years later at the Basilico Fine Arts Gallery in New York City.
Very early in his art career Tolle was touted as an up-and-coming young artist by Interview magazine in 1995, while The New York Times, Artforum and The Village Voice have reviewed his exhibits and career.Tolle's piece Witch Catcher, drawn in part from his childhood memories, is a large-scale installation depicting the architectural vestiges of a 17th-century New England home. A brick chimney, which twists 25 feet into the air, is surrounded by the perimeter of the house's foundation. This piece combines fact, fiction, and physical presence to invoke collective memory and spark curiosity for history's neglected corners.
Witch Catcher serves in many ways as a prequel to his more recent and ambitious work on the Irish Hunger Memorial (2002), located just blocks away along the Battery Park City esplanade. The memorial simulates a rural Irish landscape by means of a sloping grassy expanse and an abandoned cottage, and is located at Vesey Street in Battery Park City. Tolle was selected from over 150 artists to design a memorial to the Irish Famine on an acre of land. The work commemorates a 150-year-old tragedy, the great Irish famine of 1845-52. It illuminates Ireland's tragedy in undeniable universal human terms, gripping the viewer with the combination of information and spatial experience.
