Reno, NV – The Metro Gallery at Reno City Hall is hosting “Backyard Radiance,” a solo exhibition by 2024 Reno City Artist Chris Lanier. The show runs from March 25 – May 17, 2024, showcasing photographs by Lanier that embrace both the marvelous and the mundane.

The artist reception will take place on Tuesday, April 2, from 5 – 7 p.m. City of Reno Poet Laureate, Jesse James Ziegler, will join Lanier in a collaborative and poetic performance. Admission to the exhibition and reception is free and open to the public.

Over the past twelve years, Lanier has been posting almost daily photos from his life on Instagram, converting it to a mobile gallery (of sorts). For this exhibition, he draws from this archive, bringing the digital photographs back into the physical realm. Lanier’s images often feel like echoes, something that seems both familiar and new. Each one is well composed, providing an enjoyable artistic image. Rather than alienating us through aesthetic formality, the familiarity of the ordinary creeps in, inviting us to reflect on our own marvelous/mundane moments.

As a window into this process, Lanier shares, “I intend “Backyard Radiance” to be a very local, very idiosyncratic homage to the ordinary, the day-to-day – which, when attended to with a certain intention or reverence, becomes something perhaps a little marvelous.”

Chris Lanier is a Teaching Professor of Digital Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, teaching both at UNR Lake Tahoe and the Reno campus. He has worked in a variety of media, including multimedia performance, digital animation, web production, and comics. His work has been displayed, performed and projected in New York, San Francisco, Japan, Canada, Britain, Mexico and Serbia; his animation has screened at Sundance, and won the Grand Prize for Internet Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

https://www.instagram.com/chrislanier