Traces Remain – Melissa Cowper-Smith
Exhibition Dates: March 23 – April 20, 2018
Friday, March 23 – 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Public reception

The work of Melissa Cowper-Smith explores the contemporary fear of disaster, abandonment, and displacement. Using plants such as bamboo, hosta, yucca, and daylily collected from The Penland School for Crafts and from her ecological farm in Morrilton, Arkansas, she hand makes paper. With this paper, Cowper-Smith creates digital prints of her photographs and paintings created using imagery from small Ozark farms, abandoned buildings, and recently war-torn countries.

She depicts natural and agricultural landscapes and domestic objects and interiors as a way of expressing physical intimacy and the forgetting and passing of time. Cowper-Smith has exhibited in several New York City galleries, as well as in exhibitions throughout the country, and is currently teaching at the University of Central Arkansas.