Angela Kallus makes paintings of “roses” that look like many things, including (but not limited to) frosted cakes, prosthetics, and sculptural friezes, but she assures you they are made strictly of paint, one rose at a time. She also makes drawings that resemble old paintings, using for models mass-market, paperback booklets—twentieth century relics produced before the dominion of the screen subsumed the collective literary imagination and turned everyone into the star of their own miniseries. She earned her MFA from UNLV in 2003, and has since been asked countless times “Do you know Dave Hickey?” Yes, that’s why she moved to Las Vegas: she found his discourse on beauty to be as persuasive then as now. She values craft highly, and readily claims that while her stratagems may be outré at the moment—her work is neither post-skill, nor post- studio, nor can it be construed as “social practice”—she believes that everything comes back around eventually.