smoke the moon joyfully announces the two person exhibition of Cory Feder and Jieun Reiner’s work, An Iris Between Us. The two New Mexico-based artists will each present a series of new works in smoke the moon’s main gallery. A beacon of the season of emergence, the iris works through the compacted depths of winter’s soil and turns its luminous face toward the rising sun.
Weaving together investigations of traditional form and its ecstatic modern interpolations, both artists are integrating their personal lineages into their work to form new presences. Feder and Reiner share a Korean heritage, and this show incorporates references to Korean cultural traditions. Through each artist’s creative engagement with their own personal histories, an embodied relationality asserts itself in the gallery. A conversation both between the artists and their work and between perception - of the self and other - is taking place in An Iris Between Us. The flower blooms between bodies, in conversation with land, culture and identity.
Cory Feder (Nambé, NM) is a painter, illustrator and sculptor interested in divine and daily expressions of devotion. Feder will debut a suite of clay pigment paintings on panel inspired both by Dancheong (Korean temple paintings) as well as the spiritual tenor of Psalm 139. Working within the muted color palette of clay pigment, this new direction of Feder’s practice takes on stillness and a sense of history, as if the paintings themselves exist between religious offering and art piece.
Psalm 139 talks about being “made in the secret place;” a direct relationship between corporeal life and something larger than the individual. Both the temple paintings and Psalm are places where the divine is in communion with people, a meeting point towards the spiritual plane. Feder’s practice is one of devotional painting; she is creating sparsely intimate scenes that contain a dispersed godliness. A figure or a star, each its own celestial possibility, crops up across her work. These omniscient presences make the cosmos personal, and act as guides or sages through the prayer of Feder’s work.
Jieun Reiner (Santa Fe, NM) is an oil painter transmuting a place of dreams into an ever-flowing visual language. This new body of work debuts a new way of working for the artist; beginning from a deeply subconscious place and letting form follow a sort of painterly automatic writing. The paintings that emerge from this place are looser - brushstrokes and tessellated pools running through a landscape of dreams.
Reiner will also debut new sculptural work in this show. Taking inspiration from Norigae, a traditional Korean form of tasseled and knotted ornamentation, the artist created wall hanging work that incorporates her metalworking background into sculptural paintings. Strands of pigmented silk descend from cast bronze, a hazy movement of flat sun and spectral vista.
The paintings that Reiner will debut in An Iris Between Us pursue an index of the wonders of the in between. Working through central curiosities around utopia and dystopia, mixed race identity, and the linguistic possibility of image making, Reiner is carving out spaces in her work that don’t exist anywhere else. The turn toward abstraction lends Reiner the opportunity to work through anchors of personal history, symbology and memory to create a home for a new type of language. Mutable states and doubled landscapes meld into each other through iridine, prismatic conjurings of scene and language.
Feder and Reiner’s work underscores the ways that art making is an intrinsically imaginative practice. Through each, new ways of seeing, reading and of listening appear as a glimmer on the horizon. Another apparitional figure, Iris was the name of the minister and messenger of the Olympian gods (especially of Hera). Represented visually by the rainbow (a symbol of the descent of a celestial messenger), mythology around the goddess Iris dates back to Ancient Greece when she was regarded as the link between heaven and earth. Both artists are attuned toward this linkage- merging metaphysical worlds with natural ones - the real and surreal in an enduring dance.
Be it through material or subject - earthly wonders run freely through both artist’s work - each piece in the show offers something the viewer might grasp hold of, even as they are simultaneously set adrift. These offerings become terrestrial companions as we make our way into a speculative realm alongside the artists. We make our own Edens. We ascend and descend, simultaneously and all the time. By tuning their practices toward the resplendent offerings of the earth, Reiner and Feder offer new visions of Eden, full of contradiction and pleasure.