LENOX, MASS.- Sohn Fine Art is presenting Blaze, Smolder, Char, an elemental exploration of fire and smoke as artistic mediums. Featuring the work of acclaimed artists Marieken Cochius, Dennis Lee Mitchell, and Leah Raintree, the exhibition ignites a conversation between materiality, transformation and the ephemeral. A public reception will be held on Saturday, August 9, 4:00 - 6:00, offering an opportunity to meet the artists.

Through processes that involve actual fire and smoke as well as materials made from those components, each artist pushes the boundaries of traditional mark-making, harnessing the raw, unpredictable qualities of nature’s most volatile elements. The result is a mesmerizing and visceral body of work that speaks to destruction, regeneration, and the delicate balance between chaos and control. Blaze, Smolder, Char invites viewers to contemplate the paradoxical nature of fire: its capacity to destroy and to illuminate, to leave marks that are at once wild and beautiful. This exhibition is both a sensory experience and a meditation on impermanence, resilience, and the alchemy of artistic transformation.

Just twelve years ago, Dennis Lee Mitchell, a trained ceramicist, developed a unique studio process to capture the visible vestiges of undulating smoke on sheets of paper. Through flame and smoke, Mitchell creates a gestural imprint of energy and movement. Resembling florets, the resulting forms are mandalas, suggesting both the physicality of the body and the immateriality of breath. Although abstract, they strike a balance between the representational and the ephemeral.

Raised in a small farm town in Kansas, Mitchell would spend hours looking closely into flowers and when asked what he was doing by his parents, he would respond that he was “looking into the universe.” The mandalas symbolize the coexistence of microcosm and macrocosm. Mitchell comes to these forms with the aid of a spinning wheel that is eight feet in diameter and affixed to his studio wall. “I needed something to alleviate programming and to leave something to chance,” says Mitchell, which is what inspired his use of the wheel. Of the centrifugal pieces, or possibly he was speaking of life generally, Mitchell said, “I am constantly looking for the center point.”

Mitchell is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Mitchell participated in the Art in Embassy program, selected by the U.S. State Department to be a guest artist in Turkey. His work is held in many private and public collections and numerous museums including the Denver Art Museum, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Clarke House Museum in Chicago, and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, among others. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University.

Marieken Cochius is a Dutch-born artist who is drawn to remote places where she studies nature and makes elemental art inspired by it. Cochius is fascinated by growth-forms, root systems of plants, seedpods and animal architecture. In those she sees a sensitive chaos that contains and propels the origins and energies of life. She strives to create a mesmerizing effect of movement, something that looks familiar, but that you cannot exactly place.

Included in the exhibition are artworks from Cochius’s “Digging through the Universe” series. The mediums used to create these collage paintings include organic matter, charcoal, fire, smoke, graphite, rust, pigments and oil paint. Also included are her “Welded Drawings”. Unlike regular welding where pieces of metal are fused together, Cochius uses her MIG welder mainly as a drawing tool, melting wire to build up reliefs. By adjusting the voltage and the wire speed she is able to make different thicknesses of lines and steel bubbles which grow together into nerve- or root-like systems. She also intentionally burns through the metal, creating organic shapes with lace-like openings.

In 2021 Cochius received an NYSCA Decentralization Grant for an Individual Artist Commission. She is a 2020 recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund grant. In 2017 Cochius completed a public sculpture commission for the Village of Wappingers Falls, NY, made possible by a grant from the Hudson River Foundation. Her work has been featured in Elle Decor, Columbia Journal, the New York Times, and in over 40 art, literary, poetry and university publications. Cochius studied photography at the Art Academy St. Joost in Breda, the Netherlands and is self-taught in drawing, sculpture and painting. She currently lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Leah Raintree is an artist based in Richmond, VA and Brooklyn, NY. Her practice focuses on the human connection to earth, with an interest in how we frame and experience time, matter, scale, and phenomena. Her work is rooted in experimental drawing practice that spans media, with projects developing through a combination of process-based mark-making and direct engagement with organic

materiality and place. Raintree primarily works across drawing, ceramic, and camera-less photographic processes, often incorporating site-specific materials directly into projects, treating the Earth, time, and matter not only as subjects, but as active participants in the work. These investigations occur at the scale of the body, revealing interrelationships between human and geologic scales. Raintree’s cross-disciplinary exploration stems from her interest in human artifacts that reveal how the Earth’s history and human storytelling are deeply intertwined. Raintree often works with materials sourced directly from the environment, allowing the properties of stone, sediments, and ash to transform her projects, bringing chance and material agency to the forefront of her process. Included in the exhibit are works from “The Fire Tapestries”, made with washes of char from the wildfires in California with graphite drawings on top. The language of ancient tapestries inform the project, both as record keepers and historic artifacts that are fragile, repaired, and survive as storytellers. Raintree is interested in the regenerative process of ecological and human communities, and how repair and renewal shape human and non-human futures.

Raintree holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. She has held solo exhibitions at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, NY, Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA, and W&L University’s Staniar Gallery in Lexington, VA. She has been awarded numerous Artist-in-Residence fellowships, including through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace and Process Space, NYC, Lower East Side Printshop’s Keyholder Residency, NYC, Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium, and the Banff Centre, Canada. Raintree has also worked as an educator and museum administrator at institutions including Parsons School of Design, Judd Foundation, and MoMA PS1.