Curated by Mark Todd and Aaron Smith

Exhibition
Ongoing

Hey There Projects is located near the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. Initiated by intrepid artists and old friends Mark Todd and Aaron Smith, the gallery showcases emerging and established artists in a setting surrounded by vast natural splendor. 

Curators

Mark Todd is an artist, teacher and curator living in Los Angeles. For this exhibition he has brought together a cohesive and eclectic group of local artists whose work signifies the current climate of modern mark making. Much like The Post It Show that he curates each year at Giant Robot Gallery, Mark’s curating style is immensely creative, with a vision for inviting artists and viewers into a space that is as fun as it is insightful and provoking.

Aaron Smith creates thick, colorful oil portraits based on vintage photographs from the Victorian and Edwardian era, which has long fascinated him. For years he has collected vintage photographs of men of the period. To him, these men represent a masculine ideal, if largely a constructed one. Their bearded faces and distinguished attire are spectacular, while their stiff poses and serious expressions belie an existential vulnerability. In each of Smith’s impasto portraits, woozy colors and aggressive surfaces act as a foil to the sitter’s stoic pose, reflecting a giddy ambivalence to nostalgia. This work has found support from a convergence of interrelated subcultures including Neo-Dandyism, Bear Culture, as well as Beard and Mustache Enthusiasts. The artist shares a desire to revel in the exaggeration of masculinity’s archetypes, mining past forms of male identity in an attempt to free them of any heteronormative constraints.

Purchase artwork from Hey There Projects: in sp[a]ce