Fresh on the heels of last year's Tough Guys & A Little Girl series, HEDCHEQ is back to saturate our visual minds with new editions of portraits rendered in his unmistakable style. Resembling vintage paint-by-numbers sets and employing a palette that jumps from muted camouflage to acid-psychedelia to sun-drenched urban coastline, HEDCHEQ's latest batch of prints, paintings and t-shirts seep into the nostalgic places of the mind and reconstruct one’s contemporary lens of perception.

HEDCHEQ cannot imagine life without music, much less his creative process without a soundtrack. With MUSIC he honors some of his pivotal heroes who could be deemed icons of the American experience. The result is portraiture so lush, one may wonder if 3-D glasses are intended to be part of the exhibition, catapulting the interaction with the work to an even deeper sensually altered dimension. Just as a smell can vividly trigger recollection of a subtle moment in time, HEDCHEQ's new series provokes the viewer to hear music that isn't there, regardless of whether or not the figure is personally meaningful to us. In silence, we experience the profound effect of recognizing the music makers who have become part of us by simple virtue of collective experience.

When not working as the artist HEDCHEQ, he is Mark Smith, one of the core designers of Nike’s Innovation Kitchen. As he continues to evolve as both a visual artist and designer – whether in the environment of his personal studio or the Nike campus – it is fascinating to watch how his creative practices continue to inform one another. Mark’s work is a vivid example of how boundaries (at least in Western culture) between art, craft and design rapidly continue to overlap and, in some instances, dissolve. Groundbreaking technologies are enabling one-of-a-kind aesthetics to reemerge into forms and objects of everyday life; what could once only be achieved by hand has entered a whole new realm of machinated possibility.

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