H Y B R I D - C R O S S I N G: Exhibition Statement

This body of work is a collection of oil paintings utilizing color relationships to describe experiences of crossing. Through exploring tensions of line forms and textured color fields, these paintings express the beauty of hybrid crossing, while mapping out abstract relationships of bodies and landscapes. Hybrid being is manifested in the existence mentally, spiritually, and physically between two paradigms, cultures, and connections to place. Hybrid being spends time crossing and contemplating the differences of paradigm and mapping out of the space in-between. Kaila Farrell-Smith is working on her MFA at Portland State University and will graduate in 2014, she received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2004. Kaila teaches and mentors at Journey’s in Creativity an indigenous youth art camp at Oregon College of Arts and Craft in Portland, Oregon and has shown at emerging regional and international exhibits since 2003.

In the Spirit 2013 Artist Statement

I am conceptually incorporating indigenous postcolonial theory reconciling two conflicting paradigms. My focus is on healing the historical traumas of dislocation, displacement, loss of language and ceremony, while simultaneously upholding stories of survival, spiritual regeneration, and ultimately the power of memory and invention. This is being explored through the visual language of abstract expressionism and color in oil painting. Returning to homelands is a decolonizing imperative that I utilize conceptually in the studio. I use abstraction to organize visual information that interprets this sense of displacement from indigenous lands, to depict earth’s sustenance, and reestablish connection to place. The paintings “Wocus Gatherers” and “Lava Field Stronghold” reflect a transcendent return to ancestral homeland, psychological maps locating a post-colonial identity within contemporary concepts of landscape.

Returning to Homelands--->Contemplating Displacement

Returning to homelands---> a decolonizing imperative. This is what I've been more literally approaching recently in my studio. I have been thinking of homelands as the places, spaces, spirit of food sustenance, ceremonial grounds, lost or disconnected attachment to a specific part of earth. I was born in my ancestral homelands, I've traveled back there and visited, but never spent meaningful durations in those sacred spaces. I am painting my ancestral homelands and through art making I transport myself to those places, returning. The part that is interesting and confusing is that through contemplating this return, I realize the displacement that exists and this contemplation of displacement makes sense through abstraction. Is returning to homelands a mental exercise, a spiritual journey, a physical act of travel, an experience possibly had through the act of painting a memory of place? I know that I return to the home of my ancestors through many paths, singing, painting, telling stories, remembering, smelling the earth. This is important to my artistic exploration, life journey, and mainly in relearning how to be a human being.