Salvador Dalí's Birthday Party | J. Parker Valentine and Jay Heikes

While it may be difficult to put one’s finger on Valentine and Heikes’s exhibition and its relationship to Dalí or DeFeo, or see the constellation of its points of departure as anything more than points, this show is not a free for all. The connections that it would like to conjure specifically include the disembodied journey, perhaps to the afterlife, or another time, or how to represent the leap across the uncrossable; deviations from official narratives to reveal something hidden, or unrecognized, maybe something even embarrassing, but pulled from somewhere deeper, in this case, from the artists’ practice; and a circular, or cyclical process of making across media, documenting, coming back around through various creations as renewal or births, that somehow the artwork itself may be a side effect of something more lived. This exhibition might ask if we are looking at an artist’s work in the right way, or is it a backdrop to something else, more fluid, more accumulative. It is searching as an end in and of itself, particularly in a fundamental activity such as drawing, and its connections to painting, sculpting and the hybrids they can create that, as de Feo would say, “transcend the definition of the objects from which they are derived.”

Gallery Hours: Friday - Sunday 12-5pm

Image: Jay Heikes, Untitled, 2026