Elizabeth Leach Gallery is also pleased to present Desert or Ocean, an exhibition in our first gallery featuring works by Mark R. Smith.
Desert or Ocean features new textile paintings and works on paper for which the subject of climate change and the resulting climate-induced migration serve as a narrative backdrop for the artist’s material investigations and symbolic use of color. In this work Smith continues to investigate the notion of symmetry as a harmonizing element, fashioning linear units of striped fabric into complex interlocking forms and completed rectilinear circuits.
While formally abstract, the work visually references large and small environmental phenomena–meandering rivers, snaking roadways, insect foraging trails, and vast columns of people–to suggest essential movement, questing and/or displacement. This looping and layered imagery also references existing cultural and political polarities in which policy priorities seesaw between competing narratives, as the public at large navigates toward effective solutions to these existential problems.
In the Meander series, the dome-like shapes at the top of each composition double as cross-sections of the human brain including its central amygdala, the primary hub for emotional processing. Although the pathways wind through color fields evocative of climate extremes, the brain-like domes suggest a collective and meditative destination point, where fear and irrational thinking can also be subject to information and reason.
Several paintings and works on paper in the exhibition focus exclusively on images of domes, which can be seen as dwellings, colonies, or communities. Inspired by collective human architecture, such as churches or stadiums, these forms also allude to natural domes, both terrestrial and aquatic: insects (ant hills, termite mounds) and sea creatures (reef colonies, rocks with mussels, barnacles).
