Robert Heckes, a native of Sacramento and former longtime Brooklyn resident may call Santa Barbara the “ultimate exodus spot,” but it’s not at all clear that he’s abandoned the frenetic pace of the city. For Heckes, New York, L.A., and the myriad of in-between and international points converge in Santa Barbara (indeed, he now calls Santa Barbara home). Heckes owns and manages NeoImages.net, the popular online artist community that was founded in 1999. In 2003, Heckes took over the site and launched its massive redesign. NeoImages is currently home to nearly 1,500 artists and showcases over 15,000 works of art. Heckes says, “I’m constantly looking at photos of artwork; it’s as if all these thousands of studios are connected through the site. It feeds me, really. It satisfies the craving, like living in New York or L.A.” But it is not so much the artwork he sees as the process of going online to see it that has inspired his latest series.

Heckes’ new large-scale mixed media collages, on view this summer in a show called “Summer Pop” at Edward Cella Art+Architecture, seek out similar attitudes evinced by snapshots posted on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Combining intricate collage work with skillfully painted and simply drawn figures, the series Sand Stars reveals a vocabulary of poses struck by fashion models and consumers alike. The bikini-clad young women in Sand Stars easily adopt the overtly sexual poses and steely stares of high fashion runway models. Provocatively low camera angles emphasize the long legs and thin torsos of the girls as they recline on sandy beaches under hazy blue skies. Stemming from a longstanding interest in the iconography of advertising, the series underscores the consumerist impulse that drives the advertising industry: Heckes used collage to recreate areas of the original photographs that showed items purchased in a store, while handmade or natural elements were rendered in paint.

His collages have included vintage playing cards since a project he undertook as an MFA student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1980s. “It was a 40-foot wall space, and I didn’t really know what to do with it,” Heckes recalls. “I’d been looking at Picasso and Braque and thinking about all the miscellaneous things they’d stuck on the picture plane. On a whim I thought, well, maybe I’ll just make the whole thing out of playing cards.” Initially the medium determined the subject of Heckes’ large-scale collages: Western motifs or airplanes often graced the back of the card decks that companies handed out as promotional items in the 1950s and ’60s. But Heckes became increasingly interested in the effect of such images, the story of rugged individualism as told by the picture of a cowboy or the technological prowess implied by an ascending airplane. This led him to look more closely at the images used in contemporary advertising, particularly those that featured women. “People respond to these images because they’re so used to seeing them,” Heckes explains. “They like them and they don’t question them, so by taking an advertising image out of context, by collaging it with something unexpected, it becomes a subtle way to speak to the viewer in the consumer language they are familiar with.”

Heckes’ collage excels in its ability to highlight the conflict that can arise between an image and the medium employed to recreate it on canvas. As a result, these multi-layered works are as fantastically dense in representational meaning as they are thick with the strata of artistic media.

“Sand Star, #2,” 2007, collage, ink and acrylic on paper, 42" x 56"


“Summer Pop” was on view June 7–July 29, 2007 at Edward Cella Art+Architecture, located at 10 E. Figueroa Street, in Santa Barbara, Calif.; 805.962.5900 or www.edwardcella.com