Fly by Night
Anaïs Morales and Dom Smith
April 26th - June 7th, 2025
Opening reception:
April 26th, 2025
6:00 - 10:00
It is a very good thing to feel which way the wind is blowing by moistening one's finger. The works on view in ‘fly by night’ present motifs in painting that are not the subject. Anaïs Morales and Dom Smith both make paintings that begin with some thing…an image, a texture, a thing they saw. Unbound by hierarchies of representation, and negating the dialogues surrounding current notions of abstraction; these elements become mutable forms that are reduced, then shift in scale, and materiality.
Morales and Smith will be presenting discrete selections from separate yet parallel bodies of work where process and materiality are paramount to expression. On view from Morales will be works from two separate series. The first called Recurrence a vacu formed painting made of polystyrene in which the central form takes on a quasi death mask character; one of the penultimate iterations of a series of work last shown in 2022. The second is a new representational drawing in charcoal on vellum. From Smith, a large scale oil and charcoal painting on nylon will be on view along with an acrylic, oil stick, and charcoal work on paper, and an artist made repoussé and brass patinaed spear tip.
Morales and Smith approach their work as Janus. Dual characters with eyes forward and backward, experimenting through material and process. Proffering these gifts towards the immutable. Thoughts can exist without language, but do morticians ever really get a day off?
