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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One of the largest public art exhibits in Nevada happens this weekend. But that’s not really what’s so unique about the show.  “12 Inches of Sin,” which will be housed in 72,000-square-feet of downtown’s New

Orleans Square at Commerciial Center, 953 E. Sahara Avenue.  In addition, this year’s show features bands, DJ’s, lectures and how-to demonstrations. One lecture is about “kink etiquette.”

Event organizer, Laura Henkel, joined State of Nevada to talk about the show.  Henkel says the show has grown so much over six years that artists this year will come from not only Nevada, but from several countries around the world. “This is art, not porn,” says Henkel. > Listen to State of Nevada, KNPR

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Six times larger than in years past, the 72,000-square-foot, two-story retail space will be transformed into an immersive playground for the adventurous at New Orleans Square at the Commercial Center. 12 Inches of Sin was previously held inside The Arts Factory, and the new location offers room for a dizzying array of art, entertainment and educational workshops. Organizer, sexologist and Sin City Gallery owner Dr. Laura Henkel has designed the festival to be art-centric, with more than 100 artists from multiple countries set to participate. > Read More

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In April 2016, Sin City Gallery presented Immersive, an ambitious art show that filled not only Sin City’s Arts Factory space but the parking lot outside. The event’s eye-catching poster featured a Kei Kusuma work titled “Spoiled Ram”—a striking ink-and-paper illustration of a wide-eyed woman emerging from a wall of black flowers, a grinning animal peering over her head like the Cheshire Cat.

Kusuma, an Indonesian artist, had previously won the grand prize of Sin City’s annual juried show 12 Inches of Sin; his art is a perfect example of the kind of provocative work Sin City gallerist Laura Henkel routinely sources out for Vegas audiences. And it’s only fitting that a Kusuma solo show, Ultrablack, comes to Sin City just as the gallery prepares to venture out into the world once again—this time more decisively. > 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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You can look but you can’t touch. The rubbery, wet-looking pieces in Chris Bauder’s “Strange Glove” solo show at Sin City Gallery ask to be interacted with, but there’s a reason the fleshy assault rifles are protected behind a glass case. He likes the idea of people wanting to interact but having to resist. Bauder takes everyday found objects and makes them mysterious by coating them with a new skin, making each piece both tempting and intimidating like off-limits sexual fantasies. “Strange Glove” runs through March 24 and you can see more of his work at Tilting the Basin contemporary art exhibition through May 14. > Read More

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A toy gun and an old computer mouse sit on a shelf, their plastic shells encased in salmon-pink latex. At least that’s what one can assume they were before artist Chris Bauder transformed them into aesthetically glutinous pieces for his latest exhibit, Strange Glove.

The mouse, titled “Backlash,” now resembles a dominatrix’s whip, and the gun, named “Old Dog,” feels oddly sexual, too. Whether it’s the bright flesh-toned hues or the slimy sheen of stretched latex, these viscid sculptures explore the intimacy and familiarity in the erotic, taboo and unknown.

Bauder has typically used latex house paint three-dimensionally in his work, but in Strange Glove, the Las Vegas-based artist pushes the boundaries of his manipulations even further. “I’ve always been a fan of making work that people want to touch that people aren’t allowed to,” Bauder says. The result is an innate curiosity and desire to reach out and feel the whimsical and bizarre pieces on display.

Bauder says he used these found objects to create a series of weapons that ignite a conversation about sex and violence, turn-ons and turn-offs. “The nature of the work is naturally erotic,” Bauder says. “It’s latex, it’s slick, it’s shiny, it’s sexy. It references taboo and domination. Since I’m showing at Sin City, I was given a little more leeway, so I thought I’d cross that line a little bit more. But it’s not about beating you in the head with eroticism.”

As in past works “Blossoms” and “Study of Navels”—from 2012’s Lush—Bauder uses pink latex paint to craft sexually-charged sculptures that resemble vaginas and nipples in “Pink Parts.” In “Untitled (Green Orb I)” and “Untitled (Green Orb II),” Bauder uses more latex paint, balloons and an LED lighting display to create neon green spheres that glow like two extraterrestrial sacs straight out of Alien. > Read More

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