SPY Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Jaxon Demme, her second solo presentation with the gallery. An opening reception will be held on July 14th, 2023 from 6 - 10 PM.

"The heart is, as it were, the hearthstone and source of the innate heat by which the animal is governed… The complexity of the heart's fibers was prepared by Nature to perform a variety of functions... enlarging when it desires to attract what is useful, clasping its contents when it is time to enjoy what has been attracted, and contracting when it desires to expel residues." On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Galen, 200 AD

Well before medical science understood the complex workings of the circulatory system, the heart was already considered the most vital organ for sustaining life in the human body. Aristotle’s experiments with chickens provide one of the earliest available sources of speculation on its purpose. He inferred that the heart produced an innate heat without which all the other organs could not perform their functions. Silphium, a species of giant fennel known to Aristotle and his contemporaries, was used at the time in the creation of contraceptives and aphrodisiacs. The double-crested, single-tipped shape of the flower became associated with love and intimacy. 

The human heart figures heavily in Jaxon Demme’s new body of work. Its dual role, as giver of warmth and vessel of emotional vitality, anchors the artist’s woodland dreamscapes. Wan fairies and hexapedal fauna gather, with dead eyes and stoic affects, around the disembodied master organ, itself a floating character in the strange tableaux. Loose cannula connect the figures- wisps of plastic tubing curl around their legs and between their fingers, yet no oxygen tank is found. Demme’s use of collaged paper in the realization of these figures endows them with a delicate vulnerability, contrasted with the robust materiality of the paintings themselves. Layers of paper and latex paint are compounded, then subjected to a variety of physical trauma. Sections are sanded, or peel away like burned skin to reveal glimpses of multiple underpaintings: prior histories as harbingers of the ravages of the heart.

Jaxon Demme is an artist born in 1997 in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts - Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Finding Her at SPY Projects (Los Angeles, 2021) and Celestial Cues at No Gallery (New York, 2022). She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.