May 2022

Tugboat Gallery Proudly Presents “The Good, The Shiny, and the Subversive?” featuring South Dakota artists Klaire Lockheart, and Aaron Packard.

Klaire Lockheart is a bold realistic oil figure painter and Aaron Packard is an experimental photographer. Both share the use of punchy color, love of texture, the feeling of nostalgia and making the viewer scan every inch of the image not wanting to miss a detail.

Klaire Lockheart

Klaire Lockheart’s 6 to 7’ tall realistic oil on canvas portraits are from her Feminine Attempts series, where the woman looks like a combination of Bettie Page and Betty Crocker. The scale of the paintings allows the women to be seen as monumental and intimidating, but their outfits reveal Lockheart’s sense of humor. To highlight the contrasting roles women are expected to fulfill, such as chastity and sexiness, the women wear a combination of modest clothing and provocative footwear.

Klaire Lockheart

Aaron Packard

Aaron Packard created large archival inkjet prints on wood panel with resin for his Networks of Noise series. This body of work represents the transition of memory, from thought to thought, and investigates an abstraction of the image by deconstruction through addition: the hyper-photomontage. These glossy panels are composed of hundreds of layers of repeated images in vivid, primary colors. This artwork depicts how Packard frames his memory through an overlapping congestion of random visual moments and emotions.

Aaron Packard