Lenard Smith Refuge

SPECIAL EDITION
Perimeter Editions and the artist are producing a special edition of 30 copies, which include a signed and editioned archival pigment print (8 x 10 inches / 20.3 x 25.5cm, shown in the last image) with a certificate of authenticity.

Perched amid thirty-three acres of redwoods, two miles inland from the remote Mendocino Coast in Northern California, Salmon Creek Farm is a place like few others. Originally established as a countercultural commune in the early 1970s, today it exists as a kind of communal, longterm, living art project a queered commune, farm, and homestead, open to artists and others curious to its potentials.

On June 4, 2020 in the week following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer Salmon Creek Farms current custodian, the architect and artist Fritz Haeg, posted a callout to social media offering one of the farms cabins as a sanctuary for BIPOC artists, with no expectations, expenses or obligations.

The photographs that arose from Los Angeles-based artist Lenard Smiths time on the land the following month the same images that populate Refuge, Smiths second book for Perimeter Editions sway with a kind of gentle, arcane atmosphere unique to their setting. Lush, dense greenery fills several frames, bracketing quietly monumental renderings of Salmon Creek Farms timber cabins and other peripheral structures. Elsewhere, Smiths affinity for low-key surrealism and the still life play out in arrangements of books, tools, keepsakes, and objects gathered from the land. Gestures toward histories of the African diaspora and Black resilience intersect with spirituality and nature. A self-portrait titled Runaway Slave sees Smith in monochrome, a bindle on his shoulder as he traipses through tangles of undergrowth. Alex Haleys 1976 novel Roots and Angela Daviss seminal 1971 treatise If They Come in the Morning each appear in still life, echoing both the pain of the moment and the history that preceded it.

But even with such bearings and signposts, Smiths images prove open, dialogic, and free they are unlikely conversationalists. In a prescriptive sense, this book is about neither Salmon Creek Farm nor the socio-cultural context, but it is little without them. Refuge is about an artist being given the space to live freely, to think, and make, and play. It is about safety, and the richness of introspection, solemnity, reflection, and creativity that it affords a richness that so many of us take for granted.

98 pages, 14.5 x 22cm, OTA-bind softcover with flaps, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).