Tiffany Brown

Artist Catherine Borg is lit by a projection of her digital video installation “Self-tending,” which is part of her exhibit at The Arts Factory in downtown Las Vegas. She uses video, sculpture and drawing as well as photography, but considers all her work in those media photographic.

By Kristen Peterson

Mon, Oct 6, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Name: Catherine Borg, artist

Age: Late 30s

Medium: Multiple — video, audio, photography and sculpture. Considers her art to be photographic even when it is a video, sculpture or drawing.

Day job: Part-time cultural specialist for Clark County Parks and Recreation, programming and managing exhibitions for the Winchester Cultural Center Gallery and the Rotunda Gallery at the Clark County Government Center.

Road to Vegas: Borg grew up in the Bay Area, spent six years in New York City and New Jersey before moving to Las Vegas in 2004 with her husband, Stephen Hendee, an artist who teaches at UNLV.

Philosophy: “I’m interested in the way architecture structures our days and memories. My intent is to offer evocative images and experiences with subtleties and subtexts.”

Las Vegas influence: “Las Vegas’ unique possibilities as a cultural signifier made the prospect of coming here appealing. It is front and center in the imagery depicted in my recent work — great raw material to consider the broader culture moment we live in.”

On being an artist in Las Vegas: “My career may have taken a decidedly different track in a place like New York, perhaps finding more support for the ‘gallery work’ part of my practice. But the public art commissions I’ve worked on present an unexpected and rewarding additional avenue of support. In general, Las Vegas is more isolating than any urban/suburban locale I have lived, which I find difficult as an artist and as a person. But I have been fortunate and found artistic opportunity here.”

Exhibitions/performances: Her work has been presented at galleries and nontraditional spaces in Las Vegas, New Jersey and New York. In spring 2006 Borg collaborated with New York artist Amy Yoes on a video installation, “Experiment Phantom Area,” inside the Peppermill’s Fireside Lounge. Her nighttime projected murals illuminated through the windows of Nevada State Bank as part of the Las Vegas Centennial mural project. Recent public commissions include “Stop and Glow,” a project of artist-designed bus shelters and “ornamental,” a 120-foot work made of reflective and transparent laser-cut acrylic that replicates various patterns found on concrete midcentury modern walls surrounding homes of the area. That work is affixed to a glass wall on downtown’s Hoover Street. She currently has an exhibit, “untitled,” on display at the Contemporary Arts Collective, 101 E. Charleston Blvd.

Education: Bachelor’s (broadcasting), San Francisco State University; master’s (visual arts), Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Additional studies at the International Center for Photography and the School of Visual Arts. Independent studies, International Center for Photography and the School of Visual Arts. Both are in New York.

Hobbies/interests: Aside from art permeating her life and reading habits, she has a “burgeoning fascination with bats (the flying kind)” and gardening, which she discovered while living in Las Vegas after 17 years of city living. “I used to be into sailing, but I’m not pursing that hobby right now.”

Sticking around? “I have no idea.”