I first wrote about Vee Spears in 2008. Her series, The Birthday Party, is a series of short stories linked by the theme of an imaginary birthday party. In a conceptual and technical departure from her previous work it is partly a self portrait, sometimes woven with threads from her own childhood. Speers also wanted to use the imaginary birthday party backdrop to address both our collective human experience of war and our need to retreat from it into fantasy.

An expanded exhibition of this series will open at Environment in Los Angeles on May 12 and run through July 10th. This exhibition is in collaboration with Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta. Vee has recently published a book of The Birthday Party through Dewi Lewis Publishers.

There is always a certain tension in my work which draws the viewer into what is hidden beneath the surface. My intention was to show a real side of human nature, to expose a side of childhood that is not care-free or clichéd, and project a range of emotions and definitions which are part of an imperfect world.