smoke the moon is excited to debut When The Earth Was Young, a group show curated by Marcus Xavier Chormicle and Diego Medina. When The Earth Was Young is a group exhibition of indigenous artists, presenting the work of Nizhonniya Austin, Jordan Craig, Poyomi McDarment, Jenny Irene Miller and Brandon Ortiz. These artists bring together practices of printmaking, painting, photography, ceramics, and illustration. 

Reaching forwards and backwards in time, this exhibition calls into focus the significance of Oghá P'o'oge (Santa Fe, NM) as a gathering place: both for art and for people. Through five artists’ commitment to their distinct practices, the intersecting lines of place and time convene to recall the not so distant past, and underscore the still abundant youth of the earth and its inhabitants. Showcased during Santa Fe Indian Market, a time of gathering of Native peoples, the exhibition highlights the intentionality and care of the artist’s practices — all of whom sit at the forefront of contemporary fine art in their respective mediums.

smoke the moon proudly presents REDHORN, a solo show by multidisciplinary artist Chaz John. Chaz John (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska / Mississippi Band Choctaw) will present a series of bronze cast sculptures and multimedia wall hanging works throughout the main gallery space. Utilizing naturalistic and utilitarian materials, John will activate the whole gallery space with a collaged language of objects and their hosts. REDHORN will open with a reception on Friday, August 16th from 6 - 8pm. The show will be on view from August 16 to September 22, 2024.

What remains of a body? What remains of a city? 

Investigating both a historical imaginary and speculative future to recontextualize our current moment, John is adorning the mythic with his own idiosyncratic collection of figures and images. This show emerges from John’s extensive research of the ancient city of Cahokia — the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. Cahokia was megalithic — once the most prominent and influential urban settlement of Missisippian culture. Centuries before colonial imposition, Mississippian culture advanced complex social forms and structures across much of what is now the Central and Southeastern United States. 

Heralding the rise and fall of Cahokia, a star exploded, creating a huge celestial event. A supernova appeared as a radiant object in the sky, bright enough to be visible throughout all hours of the day and lasting over a year. This cosmic happening is thought to have brought with it a paradigmatic cultural shift and is linked to the legend of Morning Star. Various plains tribes abide by the story of Morning Star—across multiple indigenous legends the figure of Morning Star is depicted as a celestial being that emerged during the creation of the cosmos. Sometimes associated with the planet Venus, Morning Star is believed to have been created by divine force. Some tribes hold the Morning Star to be the first star to shine in the sky, heralding the dawn and with it the turning of a new day. Given that the Morning Star represents both a deity and an astral figure, REDHORN posits that celestial events at the end of the 11th century propelled Morning Star to sudden theological prominence. 

A recent recipient of a Creative Capital award, Chaz John works from story to story. He uses the materials of his extensive research to dictate the material conditions of the work he produces. Mississippians were one of the few of their time that tooled copper and explored metallurgy. This show uses materials that are of the earth and extrapolations of materials that were in use during the Cahokian period. The work in REDHORN was produced while John worked in the foundry at the Institute of American Indian Art. The foundry is an inherently collective space: it requires the labor of a group to produce one object, a stark reminder of the social nature of objects and art. 

Earthen materials gesture toward both a past and future in the show—moving through time with their own energetic and mythic aura. REDHORN will debut a suite of bronze sculptures: shells and charred wood and a sun’s face appear gilded, suspended in time and bronze. Pouring molten bronze in and through pieces of wood, John created negative casts of charred bark and tree branches, immortalizing their particularities. Walnut framed concrete relief works scaffold the walls—copper etchings of neo-tribal tattoo flash intermingling with Missisipian patterning.

Dreams speak in images. They leave their ghost image in symbols for the host body or bodies to decipher. Chaz John has penned an open map of this dream language; his overlapping reference points and temporal jumps creating a trickster’s elegy. Humor sits beside reckoning in John’s work, encouraging an emotional connection to the work that precedes logic. Mark making is a way to delineate time in REDHORN. The artist’s commanding symbology renders a moment or ambient memory as greater than the sum of its parts, illuminating the truth of what remains. Throughout the show there is a protective energy: a cosmos of sigils and alloys intermingling to form something entirely new. Future, past and present collide in John’s work, becoming spiralic hosts of one another.

smoke the moon marks the advent of summer with I Wish I Had a River, a solo exhibition of new work by Toronto based painter Nancy Friedland. Friedland’s paintings rush forward in a wellspring of emotion, alchemizing small moments into glimmers of tenderness. The work will be on view from June 28, 2024 through August 4, 2024. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 28th from 6 - 8pm.   

The artist’s idiomatic style is defined by brushy, spatially curious scenes that revolve around expressive figuration. The bodies in Friedland’s work have an emanating presence, as if they are lit from within. Her landscapes feel deeply familiar. This is the artist's first painting show that focuses on investigating scenes from her own family dynamics, often beginning with photographs she has taken. Walking through this show is an invitation to rifle through her family photo album, to ask questions about a particular page that catches our eye.

“You can’t own a river”

A painter with a photographer’s eye and training, Friedland brings an insightful perspective to her work. Movement, translation and the specificities of a changing light are central preoccupations in Friedland’s practice. Throughout her pieces she retains a photographer's relationality; the first person perspective implied in and inherent to her scenes. 

Friedland’s portraits are as much about her own positionality as they are about inference and association, history and futurity. A tributary of bloodlines: the mythic dailyness of moments lost and gained. Friedland’s work propels itself across her panels; sparks and slanted light taking on the same urgency and luminosity. Her scenes are full of another time while being obsessively devoted to the idiosyncrasies of place and object. Friedland’s work in I Wish I Had a River paints the familial as defined both by staying and leaving: those overlapping impulses and realities shaping our interactions with the people closest to us. 

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly 
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

Cars, beds, birthday cake, a body of water. These objects serve as anchors throughout the artist’s work - marking and transcending time.

The scenes rendered in Friedland’s work are drenched in early summer’s futurity - a horizon that is made in the haze of afternoon daydreaming. This feeling is captured in Friedland’s car paintings: two headlights and an empty stretch of road emerge in a blushy dusk. It feels like all the other stories in the show are in contemplation on this roadway - as if they have emerged from a field of liminal planning, carried between two spaces. 

Friedland’s parents appear in multiple paintings. Her children, too, emerge in moments of contemplative glance. There is a mystery to the timing she depicts: are the bodies in Friedland’s scenes arriving or departing? Has the party just begun or already ended? These moments are being filtered through her position as a mother, a daughter and as a sister. A vantage from what she was born into, rather than born of. There is a sense in these works that Friedland is figuring something out, that she needs to stay just a second longer to understand. The work made from this place has an immediacy and a longing - a feeling that the artist is grasping for a record of the immaterial as she lets it slip through her hands. Again, “you can’t own a river.” We cannot own our family, nor can we own the architecture of their experience, but we can observe, lay bare, and cultivate the mundane in all its fleeting beauty.

A river changes course on a dime and over lifetimes. We are no longer in the same light once we begin to describe it. The work in this show seems to revel in faulty translation - the slippage between what is seen, what is felt, and what is remembered in a knotted dance. 

Nancy Friedland is an artist investigating narrative, landscape, and darkness in her work. After studying photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design she completed her MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a Sir Edmund Walker Scholar. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and has exhibited across Canada and internationally. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with smoke the moon. Working primarily with her own photographs as source material, she is drawn to the magic that happens in the flawed translation from one medium to the next. 

As the heat of summer lays its absurd spell all over town, smoke the moon presents Ten Gallon Hat: a group show of work by Zac Brenner, Brooke Denton, Sam Hawley, Paulina Ho and Oskar Peterson. These 5 New Mexico based artists will present work in smoke the moon’s casita gallery that is both playful and resolved, each piece an invitation to descend into a surreal universe. Ten Gallon Hat opens Friday, June 28th, 2024 and is on view through Sunday, August 4th, 2024. Please join us for an opening reception on June 28th from 6 - 8pm.

The works in this show embody summer’s spirit: they appear drenched in color and humming with a rambunctious, collective vigor. Each painting in this show pens its own language; a constellation of style, reference and symbology that fuses the known and the unknown to create a new space. Animals become dear friends, faces melt into and out of paintings from life, and a tone of revelry precedes all. Each artist in Ten Gallon Hat is working through a relationship to the high desert; inside jokes kicking up dust, filling their hats to the brim and catching a new angle like mica in a stream. There is a profound sweetness to the way these artists are working, and the works emerge united by a devotion to small moments.

Michael Long is a Santa Fe based painter creating his own totemic language. Symbolic and vivid, his paintings transmute kaleidoscopic visions of a world of wonder.  

Guided by an intuitive and inquisitive mind, Long is tuned toward the mystic language inherent within everyday life. A long time practitioner of Tarot, Long approaches each of his paintings as individual Tarot cards. Each work is meant to evoke an immediate effect on the viewer, be it emotional, psychological or spiritual. Working from the hazy place between what is known and what is felt, Long acts as a conduit: each work feels full of possibility, a language of exuberance waiting to be interpreted by the viewer. 

There is a similar exuberant urgency to the way Long paints. An avid daily painter, Long works diligently; keeping journals and notebooks brimming with sketches. Long is constantly filtering inspiration from the world around him into his visual art practice. Working with both paint and natural materials, his work feels firmly rooted in the ground on which it was made while gesturing toward a wild beyond.