Smack Mellon presents a group exhibition featuring works by Leah Beeferman (with soundtracks by Byron Westbrook, Olli Aarni, and Bryce Hackford), Mimi Park, and Charisse Pearlina Weston, in addition to a photographic print by Paul Strand. This exhibition accompanies a large-scale commission by Luba Drozd in Smack Mellon’s main gallery, The Tenacity of a Fluid Trace. Both exhibitions take their titles from a historical text written in 1743 by Francesco Serao detailing his observations of Mount Vesuvius shortly after a devastating eruption. It was in this text that Serao coined the term “lava” and pushed for an understanding of volcanic eruptions as a living function of the earth as opposed to fire and brimstone.
This exhibition takes cues from the resonant and material transformations that are present within the sonic, architectural, and abstract forms of Drozd’s installation—specifically, how these elements impact bodily experience. Beeferman, Park, and Weston expand on these resonances, asking: what are the physical conditions necessary to establish what we understand to be “alive”? By what means can these conditions be perceived and communicated? And what are the tactile connections between experience and representation? Together they propose nuanced perspectives of physical bodies without explicit representation. Using discarded materials and robotics, representations of palm fronds, landscapes, bodies of water, and architecture, the works are activated by subtle movements and language to become surrogates for bodily empathy. The exhibition’s title unites these materialities, serving as a reminder that all things physical, sentient or not, have the capacity to vibrate at a frequency so high that they will, in fact, burn.
The Dissolution caus’d by Fire is in all Bodies is part of the newly launched Close Readings series, and is curated in conjunction with Luba Drozd, The Tenacity of a Fluid Trace. Once per year, Smack Mellon will present a new commission by one under-recognized, early to mid-career artist in Gallery One along with an accompanying exhibition in Gallery Two that uses the central commission as a curatorial framework. This program extends our support for interdisciplinary artists by building conversations around their practices in addition to facilitating the realization of ambitious, site-specific projects.
Image: Installation view of The Dissolution caus’d by Fire is in all Bodies. Featuring: Mimi Park (front) Particle From Ignition, Earthling, 2022, found objects, electronic components, ceramics, metal wire, solder, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist; Charisse Pearlina Weston (left to right back): The Unpossessed, 2016, Chapbook, Unique edition, 8.5 x 5.5 x .25 inches; A Case. A Vessel. A Fruit. For Touching, 2016/2022, Video projection, TRT 8’ 57”. Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo: Etienne Frossard.
Bios:
Leah Beeferman (b. 1982) works with video, digital image-making, text, and sound. She explores what emptiness and density — concepts important in quantum physics, which studies the smallest of scales — mean in landscapes on Earth, at a planetary scale. She has had solo exhibitions at Rawson Projects, New York; Arcade on Stadium, Utah; and Sorbus, Helsinki. Recent two-person or group exhibitions include Helsinki Art Museum, Finland; Fiskars Village Biennial, Finland; Sirius Arts Centre, Ireland; SOLU, Helsinki; The Anderson, Richmond.
Beeferman has participated in many residencies, including LMCC Workspace, New York; The Arctic Circle, Svalbard; Tiputini Biodiversity Research Station, Ecuador; ArsBioarctica, Finland; Mustarinda, Finland; Digital Painting Atelier, OCAD, Toronto; and Sirius, Ireland. Her work has been discussed in publications including BOMB, Objektiv, Temporary Art Review, Art in Print, Taupe Magazine, and ArtPulse. In 2016 she published an artist book, Triple Point, with Lodret Vandret, Copenhagen. She received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA from Brown University and was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant to Finland (2016–17). Beeferman is now based in Providence, where she is an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Mimi Park (b. 1996, Seoul, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist who makes site specific installations of kinetic sculptures currently living and working in New York. Park primarily takes inspiration from life’s various cyclical patterns, which includes microcosms, soft circuitry and beyond in order to build diminutive yet fantastical new worlds. The sensorial realm occupies a central role in her work, as she is interested in the ways that neurodivergent forms of communication can often be misconstrued, something that she has experienced firsthand. She has exhibited internationally, most notably a recent solo show “Dawning: dust, seeds, Coplees” at Lubov Gallery in New York; “High Jump” at New Works Gallery, Chicago; and in the group exhibition “A Drawing: A Secret” at Projektraum145, Berlin. Her work has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Art Newspaper, and Artforum.
Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; lives and works in Brooklyn) is a conceptual artist and writer whose work emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal curls, layerings, and collapses of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. She deploys the fold, concealment, and repetition within her work as tactics of conceptual abstraction which posit Black interior life as a central site for Black resistance. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of North Texas, a MSc in Modern Art: History, Curating and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art and a MFA in Studio Art, with Critical Theory emphasis, from the University of California, Irvine. She is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (2019-2020).
She has exhibited in group shows at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2020), Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School (2022), and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (2022). She exhibited in solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center (2020), Project Row Houses (2014, 2015), Recess (2021), and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University (2021). She will present her first solo museum exhibition at the Queens Museum in October 2022. She has received awards and fellowships from Artadia Fund for the Arts (Houston, 2015), the Dallas Museum of Art (2014), the Dedalus Foundation (MFA Fellowship, 2019), the Harpo Foundation (2021) and the Graham Foundation (2021) and the Museum of Art and Design (Artist Fellow, 2021). In 2021, she received the Museum of Art and Design (MAD)’s 2021 Burke Prize. She will be a Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate School in Fall 2022.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
Mimi Park would like to acknowledge Jonathan Martin’s contribution for technical support and robotics collaboration.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.
