A Las Vegas artist known for his large-scale steel sculptures, Luis Varela-Rico is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

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-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon, joining you from the Nuwu Art Gallery in Las Vegas, where the exhibition "Peso Neto" is on view through October 26.

It's the artist's first solo exhibition.

A skilled tradesman whose art reflects his Mexican heritage and working-class roots, Luis Varela-Rico, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you for having me.

-I said "tradesman" in that introduction, but I'm wondering, are you still practicing that trade, or are you now a full-time artist?

(Luis Varela-Rico) Fortunately, I've positioned myself to be able to walk away from the trade.

So the answer to that is no.

But I do, I do miss my coworkers.

-Tell me about that trade and how it impacted your work.

-I was an elevator mechanic for 15 years, Local 18 here in the valley, and it taught me everything from rigging to hydraulics to electrical theory.

Did some welding.

You know, I basically built elevators from, from the bottom up.

So, yeah, just heavy industry in general.

-And aspects of that, that apply to your work, welding would be the top one.

Any more?

-Moving large objects, which, you know, fast forward to my public art career is something that I do on a regular basis.

-So before we talk about this exhibit, I want to talk about your contributions to public art in Southern Nevada.

2018, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman names September 6, Luis Varela-Rico Day in Las Vegas.

That was at the site of your sculpture, Radial Symmetry.

Is that what you believe you are most known for here locally, that piece?

-I think for people that live in kind of the central valley, I think so.

But people that stay on the outskirts of town, they're probably more familiar with some of my other installations, but I'd have to say, generally, yeah, Radial Symmetry is the one that I'm known for.

-And the inspiration behind that were the Southern Paiutes, the first people to inhabit what we now know as Las Vegas.

How did they inspire that piece of work?

-Well, the call came out for a signature art piece.

That was the only prompt that the city had.

So I pretty much knew that the competition was going to be kind of bringing in Vegas themed motifs, so I figured I'd dig back a little bit further and just look into the history of Las Vegas.

And I'm an immigrant, so this underdog thing that happens that I see natives going through, I resonate with.

So I kind of delved into their art and saw what they were doing, and I found out about the baskets and how incredible of weavers they are and were.

They can weave baskets that can hold water.

And I just was captivated by their shapes and their pattern.

So I decided to ricochet my concept off of, off of that historical, you know, prompt.

-Will you tell me about your immigrant experience?

-Yeah.

I came over as a very young man.

I started kindergarten here, so that gives you a sense of how long I've been here.

-From Mexico?

-Yeah.

Besides my lack of any sort of accent.

And it's been fantastic, you know?

I think, I think this is one of the best countries to live in.

It has its issues, but I've-- I love living here, and it's given me an opportunity to do things like this.

-When you mentioned the underdog aspect, though, how did you experience that?

-Well, I think as an immigrant, I think we are predisposed, by ourselves, to think that we fit only in a certain position in this society.

And it's probably-- and what I mean is a service type, type work.

You know, just kind of keep your head down and work hard.

You made it here.

That's, that was the dream.

So now let's do good for the rest of the family and the people that are going to come after you.

And that, that was something that I learned, and I've watched the rest of my family do.

But I've always been really curious about how things are made and loved art, so those two kind of intersected and got me really interested in doing this.

And I've kind of just used the whole journey to get, to get here.

-That role you're talking about, though, your mother certainly did not take that on.

Will you tell our viewers what she does here in Las Vegas and her impact on you.

-My mom, Irma Varela, who I love very much, she works for the county.

She, she runs the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center off of Mojave.

She's been there 22, 23 years now.

She's getting ready to retire.

She started the Day of the Dead festival here in Las Vegas.

Some of you may have been there.

It's wonderful.

It's going down again, and we're going to be having the sculpture there.

So, yeah, and my mom has always been a person that has just never gotten in the way, so to speak.

She's seen my interests and my curiosities and allowed me to grow in a natural way without telling me that I need to be this, that, or the other.

-Your journey, you started out going to art school and then left?

How did that go?

-Out of high school, I thought I would be a ceramicist.

I was really excited about clay.

And then I got into cars, so that got me interested in metal.

So I started taking welding classes at college here after high school, and I was really trying to figure myself out and what I wanted to do.

I really felt that art was incredibly interesting, but I didn't understand how I was going to be able to make money.

So I had an opportunity to get into the elevator trade, and that was-- that was a fantastic move financially.

I had security, I had benefits, all those things, but I was still, I still kept my interest in the art world.

-Was that your first piece of public art, Radial Symmetry?

-No.

I had the opportunity.

I was paid a $500 stipend to build a sculpture for the county in the Government Center, and I ended up investing $5,000 of my own money to make this giant hand, which now resides at my friend's coffee shop called PublicUs downtown.

And that was kind of my first soiree into large scale metal art.

-Okay.

And that stipend you said came from the county?

-Yes.

-So that was your introduction into creating art for public entities.

What has that experience been like?

I can only imagine the red tape, what they're asking of you, how competitive it is.

-It's extremely competitive.

There's not a lot of calls annually here locally, but, you know, as a professional artist, you should expect to work out of state.

And, you know, it's hard, hard to get out of state, but you should definitely expect to work out of state if it's going to be viable.

Working in public art is really interesting because, yeah, there are a lot of hard parameters you have to fit in, whether it's just an esthetic parameter that the contract may call for, physics, in general, logistics, but they're all challenges that, again, going back to my experiences in the elevator trade, I've kind of had some general, you know, kind of experience with, with like moving parts and craning things and talking to really intelligent people like engineers and problem solving.

So it's, it just fits in my realm of curiosity.

So those challenges that may seem like impossible or infinite to some others are just like things that are just I feed off of and I find really interesting.

- Radial Symmetry, our colleague Maria Silva was out filming a piece for her show Bienvenidos a Las Vegas.

She was with Paco Alvarez, a curator, the historian, and he was saying it's his favorite piece that's been commissioned in Las Vegas.

But also while she was doing that interview, she said you showed up and you started, I think, polishing it?

-No.

It had just gotten hit by a car.

-Oh, no!

-I was there to repair it.

I actually had cut a bunch of the sculpture away and replaced it with new pieces.

That's what I was there for.

-Oh, my gosh.

-I might have been polishing that day, but that's what I was ultimately was there for is just to fix the sculpture.

-Because I was wondering how common that is.

Do you go around to your large works and clean them up?

-I've had two pieces.

Well, all the work in the contracts, they get maintenance programs that are signed in that are pretty much dictated by the artist.

So whoever owns the work is going to perform that maintenance program throughout the year or however often needs to be done.

But when, you know, when we have incidents like a car smashed into them, then they usually will call the artist first to see, because it's the easiest way to fix this sculpture or find a solution.

It's happened twice.

I think the most fantastic was when the heads on 215 and Eastern, one of them got cleaned off of its, of its mount and went tumbling into oncoming traffic.

And it was all caught on video.

It was, it was actually pretty cool to see, because all day I get calls and like, Hey, someone hit your sculpture.

Then towards the end of the day, someone sends me the dash cam footage, and I got to watch the whole thing, which is, you know, like not many people get.

Not many artists get to say, I got to watch my sculpture get destroyed by a Jeep Compass.

-All right.

"Peso Neto," what does that mean?

Peso Neto is Spanish for "net weight."

-And what does that mean in terms of this exhibition?

-That speaks directly to the weight that I carry in terms of representing like an entire culture, artistically and esthetically, here.

-That's a heavy weight.

-Yeah.

-A lot of responsibility.

Do you feel-- what kind of responsibility do you feel?

Are you talking about the entire Mexican heritage?

-I mean, first and foremost, I'm representing my family, you know, my mom, so I want them to be proud, and I don't want to seem crazy or out of touch.

But, yeah, in a larger extent, yeah, I want to say that I'm representing Mexican culture entirely.

So yeah, it's a lot of weight.

And I also felt that it was an easy metaphor to talk about the physical weight of the objects that I make.

So yeah, it's, it was a no-brainer for me to use that name.

-Tell me about this piece.

-This is a skull that I made for Burning Man.

It was just at Burning Man in 2024.

It's just a small piece.

It actually is suspended from an archway.

And it's there to represent a lot of different aspects of my culture: Catholicism, colonialism, Mesoamerican themes, Day of the Dead, obviously.

There's a lot of church iconography.

For instance, the sun ray coming off the skull, you're going to see that coming off a lot of the saints or, you know, people that you might see in the church.

So yeah, and I just finished it, and I want to say that it's one of the best sculptures that I've ever made.

And that's how it should be, considering, you know, I think you should always try to outdo yourself as an artist.

It's really hard to do, especially as you get better and better.

But yeah, I'm really happy with it.

-So on your website, there is a quote.

"As bodies of work come and go, they represent time capsules of who you were at a specific time.

These time capsules allow for reflection and hopefully a sense of growth, which can be fulfilling."

So if this is a time capsule, have you allowed yourself to reflect on it?

-To be honest with you, I really haven't.

Like I said, I just got back from Burning Man, and that's like being in a dream.

And then we landed from Burning Man, and we went straight into having this show.

So it's like the dust has kind of settled.

So I'm starting to slowly, kind of, be able to, you know, take it all in and reflect.

I think that that sensation will become more evident when I move on to the next project.

And, you know, I'll reflect on all the things that I've learned from doing this and, you know, having a show and even just having this interview with you.

So the answer, the short answer to that is no, not yet.

But I think it'll definitely land sooner than later.

-What do you hope people take away from this exhibit?

-That art isn't always two dimensional and that sculpture is really interesting, can be really interesting.

And it's a lot harder to make, but I think there's just, to me, there's just so much more value in a three-dimensional object than there is in 2D.

Not to take away; my girlfriend's a fantastic painter, so I don't want to get in trouble and say that paintings are not as exciting.

But for me personally, it's just, you know, the 3D aspects and the logistics and the-- I used to play with Legos.

This is, to me this is playing.

This is building my own puzzles and making my own puzzles-- designing my own puzzles, building them, and moving them around.

So yeah, it's just a lot of fun.

-Luis Varela-Rico, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you so much.