The Homebodies series explores the personal spaces of community members, the artworks and interesting objects they’ve collected through the years, and how those pieces live with them every day. For this edition, we take a peek into the collection of long-time friend and multi-talented local artist/caterpillar wrangler, Denali Lowder. Denali’s collection is full of amazing works by so many Reno artists, enough to make any Nevadan collector totally jealous!

1. I love this baby lamp…. It’s just weird and cool. My friend Jeannie sold it to me at her garage sale when she was moving away from Reno. This Lauren Cardenas piece has always been really amazing to me, she’s just a very good printmaker and artist in general. If I remember, this piece is a screenprint of a xerox-copy derivative ran through the machine a million times. And in the back, I always just love all of Summer’s artwork. Not only is she an amazing artist, but she’s also a very good friend, so that makes it really special. This is Nick’s piece!

2. The three skulls are all by Richard Jackson. I bought the bottom one at All In, and then I finally met him in real life at a raku day at the wedge (the community ceramics studio) a few weeks later and told him that I bought his piece and how much I love his stuff. It was like 11 am, but raku starts at like 6, and everybody is day-drunk by the time it’s over. He was drunk and offered to give me more pottery, and then I stopped by his office at UNR a week later and reminded him that when he was drunk he promised me more pottery, so he gave me these other two >:) 

I love the photograph of Omar’s too, he’s an amazing artist and has been such a good friend and inspiration to me for over 10 years now. I met Omar when he was ~23 and I was 17/18, and he used to come into the coffee shop that I worked at all the time. We used to talk about zines a lot, because I was absolutely obsessed with making zines at the time. When you’re a teenage girl a ridiculous amount of older boys/men hit on you, but I will always have a lot of respect for Omar because he never once made me feel uncomfortable in that way. He was always just a very pure friend to me, and showed me and taught me so many cool things over the years.

3. I think having both of these ceramic pieces by Summer is really special. It’s nice to have these little reminders of how much you’ve grown and how far you have come. The small cat planter she gave to me in exchange for something I gave her a very long time ago, but I have no idea what it was. The big blue heron vase is really beautiful, and it’s much more recent work of hers. I use it for flowers all the time actually!

4. I don’t know what mount eerie album this is from!! It’s Nick’s, and I honestly do really think it is cool though. I also love this piece by Alberto. He’s one of those people with such good ideas and such good taste, anything he makes will turn out beautiful, even if he’s doing it for the first time. And I love this little painting that Sophia made, she’s a really amazing artist, even if she won’t admit that she’s an actual “artist” (she is an artist to me). She’s actually in a neuroscience PhD program right now, so I feel like it’s doubly cool to me that she is also a super talented artist on the side. She’s another person where it feels like everything she makes, it ends up turning out incredibly cool, because she just has really great taste. 

5. I just love these two people!!! Summer and Megan are just good people and cool artists. I just think they’re both so cool. 

6. This piece by Berto, Dolores y Jude, is honestly one of my favorites. Alberto told me some stories one time about how nice his mom is, and how nice she was to a neighbor kid when they were growing up, it really just made me miss my own mom. She just seems like she has really good mom energy. My family doesn’t live in Reno, so sometimes I wish I had some mom energy around me. 

7. Isn’t this little guy that Shara made so cool??? I just love it so much. He’s so weird. I love it. Cool piece by Nate too. 

8. WOW! So here on the left is my favorite piece of artwork of all time. My mom painted it when she was drunk with her friends at some Picasso and Wine type place. Those places, for those who aren’t familiar, are places where a bunch of middle-aged white lady moms get together to have a small party, get wine drunk, and then make paintings. It’s so awesome.This is of her cat, Martin. She captured the eyes really well, it really is a spitting image of him. The two pieces by Casey I like to have together, the one on the left is the screen in which the one on the right was printed with. 

9. HT was still in the BFA program when he made this self portrait, and it was for some class where they were just supposed to print their art onto a large piece of canvas and then practice stretching the canvas over a frame they built. He’s actually such a sweetheart in real life, this portrait of him just makes him look totally crazy.

10. Here is my fridge / kitchen area. The fridge is just full of special little gems of mine and Nick’s 🙂

11. Me and Ashley were working a table at Teen Art Night at the NMA one year, and she just gave me this tiny little “deer” painting, and I made her a little painting in exchange during the event. It’s so beautiful and sweet, so I kept it around and framed it because she’s my friend and I love her. The print on the far right, by Ally Messer is also one of my favorites. I love letterpress prints so much. It’s a poem created by cut-up sections of a National Geographic, it reads:

The beetle’s celestial wings
captured light from a newborn galaxy
changing the landscape of Rome. 
“There’s a vast amount of material churning”
prelude to disaster.
The tarantula that soars over Rome
looks through the horsehead nebula
he is thoughtfully conferring with the advisors.
An Epidemic: war
disrupts everything
leaving a wake of ghost forests
and the beetles
have nowhere else to go

12. Casey (Conrad) mailed me this print of the cigarette smoking man from the x-files a few years ago, along with zines of his. His prints are so amazing and have definitely inspired me over the years to get more into printmaking. He is one of my favorite printmakers of all time! Underneath it is a Tim Kreider quote from an essay for the new york times called I Know What You Think of Me.

The essay quote reads: 

“We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time. 

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand it’s terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”