Ka'ila Farrell-Smith
For the month of August, Russo Lee Gallery presents Ghosts in the Machine by invited artist Ka’Ila Farrell-Smith. This exhibition of paintings is a visual matrix of grayscales, layering wild harvested Lithium top soil, metal detritus stencils found at Modoc Point studio ranch, acrylic and aerosol paints. Farrell-Smith’s body of work is her response to the “burgeoning global AI technocratic state that is threatening human freedom through the violent extraction of rare earth minerals from sacred Tribal spiritual grounds for the sole benefit of Western electric elitism.”
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith is a contemporary Klamath Modoc visual artist, writer and activist based in Modoc Point, Oregon. She received a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practices Studio from Portland State University. Farrell-Smith is a 2021 Hallie Ford Fellow and a 2019-2020 Fields Artist Fellow with Oregon Humanities.
Her work has been exhibited at Out of Sight, Museum of Northwest Art, Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Missoula Art Museum, MT and Medici Fortress, Cortona, Italy; and in Oregon she has work in the permanent collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum and the Portland Building. Her solo exhibition LAND BACK was on view at the Goudi'ni Native American Art Galleries at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, CA, Spring of 2023. Her work was curated in the exhibition Inherent Memory at the IAIA MoCNA in Santa Fe, NM 2023. Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea is at The Boise Art Museum, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Whatcom Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum through 2023. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans is curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and will be on view at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC through 2023 and traveling to the New Britain Museum of Art in Connecticut through 2024.
At Russo Lee Gallery, an Indigenous artist's images suggest a "green colonialism" in which extraction of minerals for new technology once again overrides tribal rights.