Russo Lee Gallery is pleased to exhibit Portal glyph by Ka’ila Farrell-Smith. This latest body of work presents a vibrant and daringly hopeful vision of alternate realities rooted in ancestral memory and earth’s material traces. Comprising nine new paintings and two monoprint series created during her 2024 residency at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Farrell-Smith fuses abstraction with petroglyphic imagery and rare earth symbolism.

Using found stencils from the Umatilla Reservation and naming each work after periodic elements, she conjures portals that challenge colonial temporality and invite viewers into multitemporal landscapes shaped by copper, color, and form. Her work blurs the boundary between past and future, suggesting not extraction or finality, but reverence, reciprocity, and radical imagining. With mountain contours, Pyramid Lake glyphs, and cosmic ibex forms emerging from dusky blues and shimmering metals, Farrell-Smith asks us to see, listen, and step into these energetic openings—to wonder, with the land, where they might take us.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith is a contemporary Klamath Modoc visual artist, writer and activist based in Modoc Point, Oregon. She received a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practices Studio from Portland State University. In 2022, Farrell-Smith was the Golden Spot artist in residence at Caldera Arts Center, she is a 2021 Hallie Ford Fellow and a 2019-2020 Fields Artist Fellow with Oregon Humanities. Her work has been exhibited at Out of Sight, Museum of Northwest Art, Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Missoula Art Museum, MT and Medici Fortress, Cortona, Italy; and in Oregon she has work in the permanent collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum and the Portland Building. Her solo exhibition Land back was on view at the Goudi’ni Native American Art Galleries at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, CA, Spring of 2023. Her work was curated in the exhibition Inherent memory at the IAIA MoCNA in Santa Fe, NM 2023. Many wests: artists shape an American idea was at The Boise Art Museum, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Whatcom Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum through 2023. The land carries our ancestors: contemporary art by native americans, curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, was on view at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC through 2023 and traveled to the New Britain Museum of Art in Connecticut through 2024.