To date, artists from 27 nations have participated, and I eagerly anticipate the next celebration of this unique artistic genre will attract more artists from around the world.

I eagerly anticipate the next time we can all be together.

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The Las Vegas Sun shares the images from patrons of 12 Inches of Sin art festival. The festival activated 30,000 sqft of retail space at New Orleans Square to exhibit artists from all over the world for its sixth annual juried art exhibition. > Read More

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The 705 Erogenous Zone
Las Vegas, NV 2017 

2,000+ sqft mural (Video)

Dr. Laura Henkel, Sin City Gallery (curation)
Alison Chambers, The 705 (building)
"Downtown" Steve Franklin, The 705 (building)
Brian "Paco" Alvarez, Zappos (materials donation)


Aaron Sheppard has a complex. Well, a few of them. But 
on this warm and breezy mid-May day, while he is in the 
beginning stages of his latest mural, The 705 Erogenous 
Zone, the artist was worried about putting his suggest-
ive work on three very public walls in a low-income, 
Latino and black community in the Cultural Corridor. 
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the authority to 
place this imagery in public,” he says. “Fuck, here comes 
another white boy coming to change what little we got left.”

Sheppard, a painter, sculptor and performer originally 
from Nebraska who received his MFA at UNLV, is now liv-
ing in a small desert home in Joshua Tree where he says 
he lives in his “artist bubble.” Shook by the president-
ial election, Sheppard began to question the validity of 
his political and social opinions as a white male. He 
says people regularly comment on his height, or assume 
he’s in a band, a presumption that pales in comparison 
to being judged by race. “I don’t feel so secure in my 
place to address such things. And that’s something that 
I have to figure out,” he says.

And while the mural on 705  N. Las Vegas Blvd. wasn’t 
used as a soapbox, the imagery in this particular loca-
tion makes a statement on its own. His work often refer-
ences Franz von Bayros, the Austrian illustrator whose 
work depicts the white bourgeois class in decadent, 
sexual scenarios from a voyeuristic hetero male per-
spective. Read More, Aaron Sheppard

 

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I think of the artist Aaron Sheppard as the person who is willing to jump off the rocks into the water first, the height does not scare him, nor the sensation of cold ocean water, or whatever lurks beneath the choppy waves…or maybe it does, but he is still determined to make the dive, to be in the moment of discovery, of danger, of sensation. Courage and joy, danger and beauty, these elements all play into a life fully experienced. Immersive and intense, Aaron’s work embraces this way of living…

The artist combines the delectably ribald with a sense the painterly modernism in a wide-ranging body of work that includes assemblages, installations, performances, and mixed media works.

Fragmenting static ideas of sexuality and gender identity, he uses his own body and image as subject repeatedly. Aaron layers this syntax with motifs from diverse sources including 20th century art, erotica, literature, mythology, popular culture, folktales and religion. The oeuvre may be seen as delightfully exhibitionist because it is constantly seems engaged in the sexy theatrics of display. However, there is also a sense of extreme vulnerability and it is this profound fragility that makes Aaron’s work powerful. > Read More

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