FROM THE HEADWATERS

Worlds Fair Gallery is excited to present From the Headwaters, a solo exhibition by Providence-based painter and silk screen artist Martin Smick. Through his work, Smick asks us to consider animal wisdom beyond human understanding. What do animals see that humans cannot? Exploring themes of animal intelligence and vision, his work invites us to reconsider our relationship to nature and the clarity that animal perspectives might offer.

The show features four distinct collections paired alongside sculptural works by Taylor Baldwin and hand-blown glass Eva Goodman]. The centerpiece is a large-scale installation of painted screen prints depicting flora and fauna— wild animals drawing viewers into an immersive ecosystem of form and meaning. Accompanying this is a selection of watercolors painted during Smick’s summer months in coastal Maine —minimal, light-filled pieces that capture the constant ebb and flow of tides shifting along the Weskeag river in Owls Head Maine, a place of deep personal significance for Smick and a place where river and ocean converge.  A standout collection focuses on schools of herring silk-screened onto loose, expressive watercolor backgrounds, evoking the dynamic movement of a school of fish and invoking the concept of the red herring in storytelling— a deliberate tactic to mislead or divert attention— reflecting themes of political distraction and misdirection. The final collection includes striking series printed over NY Times headlines on newsprint—paintings that reference resistance posters, featuring wild animals such as a bobcat, a coyote, and a blue heron. These images are paired with urgent text about human vulnerability and the imperative to stand against rising forces of oppression. Smick’s recent residency at DNA in Provincetown, MA, a program partnered with Freight + Volume Gallery in NYC was instrumental in developing some of this recent body of work. 

Taylor Baldwin’s sculptures complement Smick’s work by inviting viewers to reconsider notions of value and permanence. His pieces emphasize both the beauty and discord found in the overlooked and discarded, embodying a raw, tactile quality that reflects the complexity of human impact on the environment and the traces we leave behind. Nearly every component in Baldwin’s sculptural assemblages is found, salvaged, or reclaimed, and the work in the exhibition is no exception. Taking the form of a fragmented figure leaning against the gallery wall, it is a portrait of a neighbor who passed during the pandemic. Composed of materials reclaimed from the community and landscape surrounding her apartment - reclaimed church lumber, cement sidewalk fragments, recycling waste left on the curb - the work imagine the metaphysical connective tissue between the sites, materials, histories and individuals of the modern post-industrial American cities where we live and work.