Refuge

Refuge - Perched among 80 acres of redwoods two miles inland from Northern California’s remote Mendocino Coast, Salmon Creek Farm is a place like few others. Originally established as a countercultural commune in the early 1970s, it exists today as a kind of long-term, living community arts project—a commune, a farm, and a stone property, open to artists and others curious about its potential. \n \nOn June 4, 2020, in the week following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, Salmon Creek Farm's current caretaker, architect and artist Fritz Haeg, put out a call on social media to offer one of the farm's cabins as a sanctuary to BIPOC artists, with no expectations, expenses, or obligations. \n \nThe photographs from Los Angeles-based artist Lenard Smith’s time in the field the following month—the same images that populate Refuge, Smith’s second book for Perimeter Editions—are imbued with a kind of soft, shadowy atmosphere specific to their surroundings. Lush, dense greenery fills several frames, framing quietly monumental renderings of Salmon Creek Farm’s log cabins and other outlying structures. Elsewhere, Smith’s affinity for understated surrealism and still life manifests itself in arrangements of books, tools, mementos, and objects collected in the field. Gestures at the history of the African diaspora and Black resilience intersect with spirituality and nature. A self-portrait titled Runaway Slave shows Smith in monochrome, a spindle over his shoulder, as he moves through a tangle of underbrush. Alex Haley's novel Roots (1976) and Angela Davis's seminal treatise If They Come in the Morning (1971) both appear in still lifes, echoing both the pain of the moment and the history that preceded it.