Luke Barber-Smith
Cold Mountain

March 30, 2022 – May 15, 2022

How can I say what I saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt in Terra Incognita?

You may have visited Wyoming; you have probably seen grass; very likely you've followed a fence; you could be familiar with the outlines of antelopes. But have you seen what I've seen? Did I see what Steve saw?

The Tang Dynasty hermit-poet Cold Mountain, who was named after the wild place he inhabited, wrote:

People ask the way to Cold Mountain.

Roads fall short of Cold Mountain.

Ice stays all summer;

fog dims the dawn sun.

How did someone like me get here?

Our minds are different.

Otherwise you could get here, too.

I never could have gotten to Cold Mountain because I lack Cold Mountain's mind. I love cities as much as solitude…

– William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

Buildings conceal a furtive life in their architecture, despite their outwardly fixed and stable appearance. We may sometimes glimpse this alternate life from irregular, pedestrian angles, but otherwise the city seems to carve out its own labyrinthine character across the facades of the buildings that compose it.

In Cold Mountain, Luke Barber-Smith absorbs the architectural precedents of cities he has traveled through, translating them into digital collages that preserve an original photo while also shifting into something more interior. The cityscapes detailed by Barber-Smith rarely showcase those static structures designed to facilitate the interests of public or private life. Rather, architecture becomes fluid, a gelatinous mirror where sentient graffiti can be traced out, if only you gaze into it long enough.

Once the viewer is able to see architecture from within, as an expression of themselves, a new vista opens in place of the old. This interiority emerges through the serpentine ceramic fixtures glued to Barber-Smith’s linen and canvas dye prints, and the acrylic overlays and inked lines drawn throughout.

Luminous trails made from light, rope, and suspended cables— these sweeping threads spill from various silhouettes and become integral to the identity of each building. Oakford and Spruce presents an almost metaphysical setting where reality and falsehood converge. The starry green shape near the topmost window of the building and the wisp of orange abstraction that blocks another window below it are less embellishments than inroads leading to new architectural views that propose buildings as a form of consciousness.

In Atlantic City (eastern mist), Barber-Smith’s exploded recreation of a building in Atlantic City, the photo becomes a sublimated form of vandalism. The artist’s reclaimed ownership of the environment is expressed in a swarm of passing balloons that transform the unity of a felt environment into sheer blotches of color. While the building itself has been repurposed, the ambiguous emotional connection we have with balloons remains, and their movement toward reconfiguring space is arrested by the edges of the picture. A combination of elements rewires how we relate to built space. While the experience of cities is intimately different for each of us, this single caveat holds true: the buildings are us and we are them.

– Text by Jeffrey Grunthaner

Luke Barber-Smith — b. 1981, Philadelphia, PA; BFA: The School of Visual Arts, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent group and two-person exhibitions include First Story, Marinaro Gallery, NY (2021); Nathaniel Matthews, Original Music Op. 1 (with Luke Barber-Smith), Entrance, NY (2019); Total Power Exchange, Galerie Manqué, NY (2018); CITY LIMIT, the Journal Gallery (organized by Colin Snapp), NY (2015); Clorox/Envy, Still House, NY (2015); 1981, Parkhaus, Dusseldorf (Luke Barber-Smith and David Ostrowski) (2010); EAF at Duve Gallery, Berlin (2011); The Kings County Biennial (curated by James Fuentes), NY (2009); dear mother earth, Jericho Ditch, Portsmouth VA (2009); solo exhibitions include in memorial, 175 Canal St. MAGIC, NY (2015) and ATLANTIC CITY, Loudhailer, LA (2015)