Evan Hecox and his family spent summers throughout the 70’s and 80’s in a small mining cabin near the deserted town of Ashcroft, Colorado. His mother was a weaver and his father an artist, and together they would attend the Aspen Institute’s International Design Conference each year. The mining cabin no longer exists and the design conference ended nearly twenty years ago. However, like the ghost town of Ashcroft itself, the nostalgia of bygone eras feels alive and well within Hecox’s decidedly modern images.
Evan’s work evokes a sense of order. His reinterpretation of iconic elements from both the urban and natural settings embody the Aspen Idea through the lens of passing time. Both precise in his compositions yet ethereal in his narratives, Hecox is able to pull us in just enough to set the wheels of mystery, nostalgia and intrigue in motion. These works seem to offer a collective starting point for us to insert our own memories, and in so doing, allow us to feel a similar sense of being grounded to this place. In ways, Hecox’s work operates as a visual parallel to the lyrics immortalized by John Denver upon his arrival in Aspen, “… coming home to a place he’d never been before.”
Most childhood memories are a conflation of experiences, all of which inform our sense of origin. And while the paintings included in Perfect Day are not about a single moment, their totality suggests a perfect day sprung forth from the recesses of our mind, complete with the intense sun and deep shadows of an Aspen summer shrouded in its surrounding wilderness.
