Ka’ila Farrell-Smith’s recent works explore movement and painting as performance. Music plays an important role influencing the flow and palate of the artist’s practice, and an album that has frequented her studio is We are the Halluci Nation by a Tribe Called Red. Of particular importance is the poetry and lyrics of the late John Trudell in the track A Lie Nation (featuring Lido Pimiento and Tanya Tagaq), in which these new paintings are informally, yet directly rooted.

The Halluci Nation
The human beings
The people see the spiritual in the natural
Through sense and feeling
Everything is related
All the things of earth and in the sky have spirit
Everything is sacred
Confronted by the alienation
The subjects and the citizens see the material religions through trauma and numb
Nothing is related
All the things of the earth and in the sky have energy to be exploited
Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls, sold
Into nothing is sacred not even their self
The A Lie Nation, the alienation
                                                                   -John Trudell