The Driest State: Nevada Watersheds featured through May 28 at CCAI Courthouse Gallery

The Capital City Arts Initiative announces its exhibition, The Driest State: Nevada Watersheds, by artist Nolan Preece at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery now through May 28, 2015. The Courthouse is located at 885 E Musser Street, Carson City. The exhibition is free and the public is cordially invited. The gallery is open to the public Monday – Friday, 8am – 5pm.

"The Driest State: Nevada Watersheds" presents 29 of Nolan Preece’s photographs, many taken from an aerial perspective, that feature the beauty of the desert’s land forms, the lack of water, and the range of water needs and uses. Preece took these images over the past five years in order to document the rapidly changing environment. “As the population grows throughout the world and the West, fresh water may become one of our most precious resources,” he said. “I continue to feel an urgency to add to this body of work concerning the environment with watersheds being the most important and crucial aspect of this work.”

A native of Utah, Preece has devoted his career to photography, printmaking, and more recently, digital photography. Early in his career, he turned his focus to the environment through work for Bio Resources Company in Logan, Utah, that needed photo documentation for their Environmental Impact Statements and their data collection efforts on the oil shale tracts of eastern Utah.

Preece saw a need to document these huge tracts of land before mining began and the landscape was forever changed. In 1981, the firm commissioned him to produce a portfolio of prints photographed with a 4x5 camera. Twenty-four of these prints are now in the permanent collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City and toured in the 1983 Ten Utah Photographers exhibition.

His distinctive photographs are in many collections including the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah; the Snell and Wilmer Photography Collection, Phoenix, Arizona; and most recently the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. In 1980, Preece received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Utah State University. Preece is a retired photography professor and gallery director emeritus with Truckee Meadows Community College. He lives with his wife in Reno.

Writer Mary Webb has written the exhibition essay for The Driest State. She earned an M.A. in English at Northern Arizona University in 1984 and since then has taught English at UNR, specializing in writing courses and literary nonfiction. She writes about arid landscapes, climate, and drought in the West.

Her collaborative book, A Doubtful River, with photographers Robert Dawson and Peter Goin, was awarded the Wilbur Shepperson Prize for Western Literature. The book examines and critiques cultural perceptions of water use in the Nevada desert in the context of a prolonged drought during the 1980s. She has published essays about recreation and whitewater parks along the Truckee River, and is researching her military family’s relationship to place after experiencing the bombing at Pearl Harbor.

The Capital City Arts Initiative is an artist-centered organization committed to the encouragement and support of artists and the arts and culture of Carson City and the surrounding region. The Initiative is committed to community building for the area's diverse adult and youth populations through art projects and exhibitions, live events, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online projects.

CCAI is funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, Nevada Arts Council, City of Carson City, NV Energy Foundation, U.S. Bank Foundation, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Comstock Foundation for History and Culture, and the John and Grace Nauman Foundation.

For additional information, please visit CCAI’s website at www.arts-initiative.org.