Inlet brings together sculptures by Joe Ferriso and paintings by Sandra Smolski.

Both Ferriso and Smolski work in a way that feels like listening. In their respective studios, the artists take cues from the surface qualities of their materials, proceed intuitively, and respond to what is in front of them. There is no race towards a fixed idea or final product. For Ferriso, who collects driftwood for sculptures near his home in Northern California, woodgrain reveals “the frozen thoughts of trees,” and its directionality guides the decisions that give rise to each piece. Smolski, too, is attentive to the inherent qualities of her materials. She begins with thin layers of paint that pool on the surface of the canvas, minerals and pigments settling into patterns that are almost geological or topographical in nature, and builds atop those patterns.  

An inlet is a narrow indentation in the coastline: it is protected and small, and provides a way into a land mass. An inlet is a place where Ferriso’s driftwood might be found; it is a formation that might be suggested, submerged only to resurface, in one of Smolski’s abstractions. “Inlet,” with some unscrambling, reads as “let in.” For both Ferriso and Smolski, whether it be the direction of woodgrain leading to a knot, or the residue of paint evaporating as it dries, attentiveness to the unique qualities of the materials at hand, to texture  and color, light and minerality, lends safe passage into the work.

Sandra Smolski is based in Vancouver, B.C., the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her art practice is rooted in material research and investigates themes of formal diversity and the elasticity of visual language. Her process is based in improvisation and engaged reciprocity with the materiality and histories of painting and sculpture. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME in the summer of 2023. She is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Guelph program in Visual Art.

Joe Ferriso grew up in a household with roots in Dominican, Honduran, and Italian heritage in a middle-class, conservative community on Long Island, NY. His parents were deeply involved in a Christian fundamentalist doomsday cult during his childhood, which guided his development into art making. Drawing during church services and skateboarding after school provided an outlet for processing his experiences with authority and doctrine. 

Embracing play, freedom, and optimism, his sculptural and painted works are primarily concerned with how color perception impacts emotion. Ferriso’s subject is the relationship between architecture and nature, expressed in the language of color. His love for tuning color and the sheer energy of color motivate his actions. Like a vine to a lattice, his color enmeshes with the art object, bringing it to life. 

Ferriso works in series that emerge and recede at their own pace, driven by his previous experiments. His most recent works are condition-sensitive pieces in pursuit of a sublime experience, generating mystery from the mundane. The materials that he works with are discards or found in nature. Construction waste, building off-cuts, driftwood, found wood, and abandoned paint colors are the starting points of his labor.

Ferriso moved to the Bay Area in 2009 and is a graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA 2003) and Stanford University (MFA 2018). He lives with his wife, two young children, and a dog in Sebastopol, CA. He is an Adjunct Lecturer of Painting and Sculpture at Sonoma State University.