City Exhibitions at the Hult - Ka'ila Farrell-Smith

Welcome to the Contemporary Indigenous Art Gallery. This gallery is curated by Don Dexter and Don Dexter Gallery. The exhibit is dedicated to advancing Native and Indigenous artists and arts by presenting contemporary artworks to regional, national and international audiences and the greater community.

“G'EE'LA: Land and Creation" is a retrospective exhibition honoring Ka'ila Farrell-Smith's father, Alfred Leo Smith (1919-2014). This compilation features nine paintings that reflect Ka'ila Farrell-Smith's research into her familial lineage and connection to ancestral homelands around Modoc Point, Oregon.

The selected works range from 2011 to 2023. Earlier pieces, such as “Maq’Laq Sn’Weet’s” (Klamath Woman), explore figurative representation. “tGalam” (Towards the West) incorporates graffiti aesthetics along with petroglyphs and text to deliver urgent messages. “Ghosts in the Machine 019,” from the “Ghosts in the Machine” series, utilizes gray scales and wild-harvested Northern Paiute lithium topsoil to highlight the detrimental effects of lithium mining on the land and its peoples.

Farrell-Smith layers paint, wild-harvested pigments, text and stenciled designs to create a visual language that embodies contemporary elements and traditional patterns found in Klamath basket designs passed down through generations.

Artist Statement
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith's art practice is directly informed by her ancestral homelands in Southern Oregon. The framework of her practice focuses on channeling cultural, political and historical research through a creative flow of experimentation and artistic playfulness rooted in Indigenous aesthetics and abstract formalism.

The root of her research is within familial lineage and connection to ancestral homeland. This has required genealogical and tribal research tracking land sales/theft and legacies of settler colonialism in Oregon. Her studio practice explores space in between the indigenous and western paradigms. This research is a part of her studio practice and informs the marks, text, stencils and wild harvested pigments that make up the visual artwork.

Her painting practice is responsive to the land and place, walking and hiking are important parts of life. She harvests wild pigments — charcoal from forests impacted from wildfires, red clay, white chalk, topsoil of Lithium deposits — and mixes them with acrylic gel medium to create earth pigments. In contrast, she takes found detritus (shot up cans, barbed wire, bullets, machinery, etc.) and stencils them with aerosol paint to create the graffiti aesthetic.