Exhibition under the title Liminal of the famous visual artist Marianna Smith opens on November 23 at 6:00 p.m. in the Metropolitan Gallery “Akademiya” at 1 Shipka St. Marianna Smith is in Bulgaria at the invitation of Frthe organizing committee of The ninth itemriennale of graphics in Sofia, SBH, as a member of the international jury for determining the prize fund. This is the first in a series ofevents from the program of the triennial and it is part of the kcultural calendar of the Metropolitan Municipality.
Mariana Smith is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Stockton University, Galloway, NJ. 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 State, as and Master of Fine Arts from uCornell University.
“I work with graphics, painting and video installations, creating landscape collages and exploring spatial disruption and the nature of immigrant dislocations. The exhibition Liminal includes landscapes related to places as diverse as Venice, the Burren spaces of Ireland, the redwoods of California, as well as works based on personal memoriesMariana Smith explains.
In the series of works on Venice she is collaged stories of displacement based on her own experiences and the collection of essays on Venice Watermark by Joseph Brodsky created during residencies at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia in Italy. “I had already read Brodsky’s work before my first personal encounter with Venice, where I was struck by the unusual feeling of having memories of a place I was seeing for the first time. Joseph Brodsky’s fragmented Venetian imagery of sound, light and water corresponds to collaged fragments and a series of cinematic spaces where the distance oscillates between the material and the transitoryshe says.
The latest landscapes focus on redwoods, their beauty and the scars of catastrophic forest fires. These landscapes were created in 2023 during the creative sabbatical of Smith at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and fieldwork at 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 palpable when one walks through the parks scarred by the fires caused by climate change.
“I put the fragments back together to represent the idea of fragility and resilience. Repetitions and careful assembly are counterbalanced by the ruptures caused by chance, into new spaces encoded with the metaphors of the graph’shares Marianna Smith
On November 26, 27 and 28 Smith will be holding a 3-day photogravure master class/workshop with Solar Plates at Mrraphical base of the NHA in which will take part teachers, students and pupils.
The exhibition Liminal can be viewed until December 6.
In his artistic practice Marianna Smith uses graphics, painting and video installation in search of the unrealized dream of a homeland. Her tvorbes are represented in the USA, Italy, Taiwan, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Guam and Armenia, and are shown in the estate of MrOhio Governor in Columbus.
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