East End Boys

Casey Jex Smith

November 16 - January 4, 2025

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︎ Press Release
︎ Text by Harry Tafoya
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Stellarhighway is delighted to present East End Boys, a solo show of exquisite pen and ink drawings by Casey Jex Smith. Smith is a talented draftsman, influenced as much by late twentieth century comic book and fantasy art (especially illustrators like David A. Trampier, David C. Sutherland III and Erol Otus) as he is by Renaissance painting, Medieval herbological renderings, and Modernist architecture. In East End Boys—a consciously oppositional play on Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls”—Smith eyes his hometown of Provo, Utah, with its mountainside manors perched for easy access to ski slopes, acres of once forested ranges now honed into playgrounds that only service whim, and the idiosyncratic ideals encapsulated by a “Heaven on Earth.”

Slide and East End Boys, the two larger drawings, are depopulated paradisiacal scapes reminiscent of a three-dimensional game board or Rube Goldberg machine. They are walled places meant to maximize sensorial pleasure, blending the structures of isometric role-play-games, Architectural Digest spreads, sculpture gardens and Mormon temple rituals. Smith’s drawing Crown, a nod to Leonardo di Vinci’s Profile of a Warrior in Helmet, and for that matter Ring for Every Finger and Telling Time, all point to narratives of pompousness and greed with their obvious ostentation, whereas Tickler and 69 Tower are sites for comfort and gratification. Displaying baroque contraptions for containment and control, Erecto and Belt Buckle round out this dichotomous intercourse of have and have-not, purity and corruption, heaven and hell, and wanton indulgence versus the taboo.

The root of these psychedelic parables is in Smith’s devout Mormon upbringing: "At the center of Mormon belief is an expanded narrative built around the Garden of Eden," Smith explains, "When you attend temple ceremonies, you watch films that detail this narrative, usually made with elaborate Hollywood-type sets of the biblical garden as paradise. It's a place you want to be. Unintentionally, it's also a sexually charged landscape where you and your perfect mate tromp around in the nude, eat fruit and pet goats." Interestingly, there is no warning in East End Boys, just a kind of subdued erotic revelry. Perhaps by rendering this gulf of experience as a superimposition of paragons, Smith is teasing out deeply embedded dysfunctions in ourselves and society's framework.

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Casey Jex Smith (b. 1976) received a BFA in Painting from Brigham Young University and an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Smith creates intricate and fantastical landscape drawings with pen, graphite, and colored pencil. He constructs his environments with a superior force in mind, one that manipulates the human figure via sensual pleasures and patterns to create meaning. Smith’s elaborate visual style draws from the study of master printmakers, Persian Miniature painting, Dungeons & Dragons manuals, Where’s Waldo, and indie comics, borrowing compositional structures from RPGs, architectural magazines, pleasure gardens and Mormon temple rituals. Having grown up Mormon in the conservative Rocky Mountain state of Utah, Smith ultimately creates his wondrously imagined worlds as a means of escape. Smith’s work has been exhibited widely, including at The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Artists Space, New York, NY; Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Hyattsville, MD; The Hole, New York, NY; Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, NY; My Pet Ram, New York, NY; Turley Gallery, Hudson, NY; Minus Offspace, Vienna, Austria; and, Galerie Polaris, Paris, France. He has been published by and reviewed in Taschen, Art Review Magazine, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg, Le Journal des Art, Time Out, Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Rhizome, Artnet, Wired, ArtMaze Magazine, David Zwirner’s Platform, and New American Paintings. Smith also curates the Instagram account @thedrawingstall. The artist currently resides in Provo, Utah with his wife and two children.

︎ View available work by Casey Jex Smith

Please contact Stellarhighway for more information.