Fairbanks Gallery Presents: Maria T.D. Inocencio and Mark R. Smith

A Ring
April 1–May 16

Fairbanks Hall Gallery
220 SW 26th St, Corvallis, OR
Reception + talk April 17 at 4 p.m.

For accommodations related to ability, email art@oregonstate.edu.

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Maria T.D. Inocencio and Mark R. Smith have joined forces to create A Ring, an exhibition featuring each artist’s independent work as well as a collaborative installation. Invoking the landscape and its boundless horizon, the artists have created work which investigates universal rhythms—units of time, natural systems, work patterns, and the ongoing process of mortality and regeneration. While their themes are expansive, the artists each employ methods that are labor intensive and highly intimate, inviting close examination and identification with touch and materiality. Inocencio has long employed hand-stitching and digital photography to create dense, nature-based compositions which champion human individuality, relationships and the great potential inherent in an engaged community. Smith continues to work with castoff clothing and repurposed textiles, fashioning geometric fabric diagrams of communal architecture—sports complexes, termite mounds, temples, and churches—thinking about the collective activity therein.

The "Ring" exhibition borrows its title from a W.S. Merwin poem which ponders our place in the cosmos, and alludes to an enduring desire to connect through conversation. By encircling the viewer with images that intersect and vibrate with line, color and texture, Inocencio and Smith hope to present a world that is beautiful in its component individual humanity and its myriad possibilities.