The Forever War Painting

David Aaron Smith is a 34 year old painter, sculptor, and installation artist from rural Louisiana. He’s best known for the past eight years of his career where he founded Villa Anita in Death Valley, an architectural sculpture museum that invited visitors to stay overnight in “livable sculptures” built almost entirely from repurposed materials. A mixture of installation and performance art, Villa Anita in Death Valley has become a stalwart of ongoing Southern California Junk Dada, and most of the work you see there was made by Aaron. You may have seen more of Aaron’s work in solo and group shows in different parts of California. In the fall of 2019, he took on one of his most ambitious projects for a solo show at Gardenville Station in San Francisco. He spent a week with fellow artist, Katelyn Doherty, and filmmaker, Robin Malo, interviewing people from the Bayview Neighborhood, collecting repurposed and discarded material from that same area, and building sculptural portraits of the sitters. The result became a multimedia portrait of a whole community that is current being eroded away by gentrification and the prospect of bringing in more valuable residents.