Perimeter Editions

About

Menu




98 pages, 14.5 x 22 cm, OTA-bind softcover with flaps
Perimeter Editions 102
ISBN: 978-1-922545-29-9
AU $49 | $175

PURCHASE HERE

Lenard Smith – Refuge

Perched amid thirty-three acres of redwoods, two miles inland from the remote Mendocino Coast in Northern California, Salmon Creek Farm is a place like few others. Originally established as a countercultural commune in the early 1970s, today it exists as a kind of communal, longterm, living art project – a queered commune, farm, and homestead, open to artists and others curious to its potentials.

On June 4, 2020 – in the week following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer – Salmon Creek Farm’s current custodian, the architect and artist Fritz Haeg, posted a callout to social media offering one of the farm’s cabins as a sanctuary for BIPOC artists, with no expectations, expenses or obligations. 

The photographs that arose from Los Angeles-based artist Lenard Smith’s time on the land the following month – the same images that populate Refuge, Smith’s second book for Perimeter Editions – sway with a kind of gentle, arcane atmosphere unique to their setting. Lush, dense greenery fills several frames, bracketing quietly monumental renderings of Salmon Creek Farm’s timber cabins and other peripheral structures. Elsewhere, Smith’s affinity for low-key surrealism and the still life play out in arrangements of books, tools, keepsakes, and objects gathered from the land. Gestures toward histories of the African diaspora and Black resilience intersect with spirituality and nature. A self-portrait titled Runaway Slave sees Smith in monochrome, a bindle on his shoulder as he traipses through tangles of undergrowth. Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 treatise If They Come in the Morning each appear in still life, echoing both the pain of the moment and the history that preceded it.  

But even with such bearings and signposts, Smith’s images prove open, dialogic, and free – they are unlikely conversationalists. In a prescriptive sense, this book is about neither Salmon Creek Farm nor the socio-cultural context, but it is little without them. Refuge is about an artist being given the space to live freely, to think, and make, and play. It is about safety, and the richness of introspection, solemnity, reflection, and creativity that it affords – a richness that so many of us take for granted.


98 pages, 14.5 x 22 cm, OTA-bind softcover with flaps
Perimeter Editions 102
First Edition of 800
ISBN: 978-1-922545-29-9
Publication date: April 2024
Printed by Wilco Art Books, Netherlands
Published by Perimeter Editions
Melbourne, Australia
Editors: Justine Ellis, Ash Holmes, Dan Rule
Text: Fritz Haeg
Design: Narelle Brewer for Perimeter Bureau
Lithography: Mariska Bijl, Wilco Art BooksLenard Smith (b. 1975) is a first-generation Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist. He lives and works in Los Angeles. For more than fifteen years, he has developed a signature language that combines assemblage sculpture and still life photography. He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad; published six artist’s books, including Melancholy Objects (Perimeter Editions, 2022); and contributed photography to The New York Times and The Atlantic. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Whitney and Lee Kaplan African American Visual Culture Collection at the Getty Research Institute, Light Work (Syracuse, NY), and the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Smith received an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College, which grounds his work in traditional practices and experimental methodologies. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Riverside.

For international wholesale and distribution enquiries, images and information, please contact Perimeter Editions, Melbourne:
hello@perimetereditions.com
+61 3 9484 8101


Special Edition

Perimeter Editions and the artist are producing a special edition of 30 copies, which include a signed and editioned archival pigment print with a certificate of authenticity, (8 x 10 inches / 20.3 x 25.5cm).

AU $175

PURCHASE SPECIAL EDITION HERE

Newsletter Sign-Up