The Academy Gallery is showing an exhibition of Mariana Smith’s landscapes

The Academy Gallery of the National Academy of Art (NAA) is showing Mariana Smith’s exhibition Liminal. The author is in Bulgaria at the invitation of the organizing committee of the ninth graphics triennial in Sofia of the Union of Bulgarian Artists (SBH) as a member of the international jury for determining the prize fund. The opening is on October 23, according to the organizers.
Mariana Smith will also conduct a three-day master class on photogravure with Solar Plates at the graphic base of the NHA. Participants will be professors, students and pupils.
“The exhibition Liminal includes landscapes related to different places, such as Venice, the Burren spaces of Ireland, the redwoods of California, as well as works based on personal memories,” says the author.
According to her, the most recent landscapes are focused on redwoods, their beauty and the scars of forest fires. “They were created in 2023 during my creative residency at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and fieldwork in California’s Big Basin Redwoods and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Parks. These are testimonies of the charred remains of the majestic redwoods, of their surreal beauty. Their temporality is very palpable when one walks through the parks marked by fires caused by climate change,” adds Mariana Smith.
The Liminal exhibition in the “Academy” gallery is part of the cultural calendar of the Metropolitan Municipality. The exhibition is the first in a series of exhibitions and cultural events in the triennial program.
Mariana Smith is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Stockton University. He leads classes in drawing, graphics and modern methods of graphic printing and art books. She holds two bachelor’s degrees from Moscow College of Applied and Industrial Arts and Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio, and an MFA from Cornell University.
In her artistic practice she uses graphics, painting and video installation. Her works have been presented in the USA, Italy, Taiwan, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Guam and Armenia.
/ GN