Sarah A. Smith, Trees 1, in Gold (2011), Ink and gold leaf on paper, 38 x 50 inches

May 28 - July 3, 2011
Gallery | In the Bracken | Sarah A. Smith
Project | "Signs & Symbols" | Shawn Bitters

Opening Saturday, June 4, 2011 6-8pm

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present new work by Sarah A. Smith and Shawn Bitters, on view from May 28 - July 3, 2011.

Sarah writes: "The bracken is that scrubby, weedy edge of wasteland that you pass through as you step off the road and into the forest. When imagining this new series of drawings I wondered what is in the bracken? At first I thought: nothing. Nothing but dead and dying things in a dry tangled thicket empty of everything. I thought maybe it's that, and its also everything I don't know or understand - for the weeds continue to grow there. Specks of minerals glimmer in the soil. Beautiful nature persists even in a wasteland.

In The Bracken is a series of drawings that seeks to tell the story of the moment when you notice everything is electrified with life, hallucinatory, revelatory, tangible energy. As if all things - the trees, the moon, the animals are transmuting with the elements emanating around them. Electrified threads connect and radiate. The dark night obscures and camouflages animals that are at once defined by and enfolded with their surroundings.

Sometimes human nature is bound to nearly miss this all until the very end. The starling is labeled a nuisance bird. Its beauty ignored. The human touch is all too often one that turns everything to ruin, cuts down forests, reduces the landscape to an abstraction, piles it up and prepares to set it alight. But during all this, and in between and while: energy transforms radiating outward, the animals and we emerge and fade, pounding heart, panting breath, mixing with the elements emanating abstracted, burning out. Like a last gasp."

In conjunction with In the Bracken, Shawn Bitters will install new paper works in the project space. In the short story (and name of the installation), "Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov, a character believes that Nature is communicating directly to him through the arrangment of clouds, a network of branches; in everything he sees. Mankind has a long history of reading nature, whether it is through soothsayers, prophets, or scientists. The pair of rockfall sculptures in the project space at Swarm Gallery are readable geological formations. Each is composed of 26 paper stones, one for each letter of the alphabet, multiplied hundreds of times in various colors and sizes. Stilled and silent, they tumble through space imbued with a universal, knowable message.

Shawn Bitters, Installation view of Nature Shadows Him (2011), Screen Print on handmade paper, dimensions variable, and Next Time Won't You Sing (2009), Screen Print on paper, 27.5 x 21 (framed), Edition of 5

ARTIST BIOS:
Sarah A. Smith received her B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. She received the Kala Board Prize from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2005 and was awarded an Artist-in-Residence in the Project Space from the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA in 2006. Her work has been shown in galleries and institutions in Brooklyn, Boston, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, with solo shows in Oakland, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. Sarah resides in San Francisco. This is her first solo exhibition at Swarm Gallery.

Originally from Orem, Utah, Shawn Bitters received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and his BFA from Brigham Young University in 2002. His shows include the International Print Center of New York and Dieu DonnŽ Papermill both in New York City, Phillip Pearlstein Gallery, Philadelphia, The Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, in Kansas City, the Providence Art Club, Providence, Rhode Island, and Temple University, Rome. He was recently an artist-in-residence at the Council of Danish Artist Residency on Hirsholm Island, Denmark and at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belguim in 2009. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Kansas. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife Daina and their 3 children, Zo‘, Milo and Ivy. This is his first installation project at Swarm Gallery.