smoke the moon presents Nancy Friedland’s solo exhibition of new paintings, Call When You Get There in the Casita Gallery. Friedland will exhibit a suite of oil paintings that capture the passage of time in an elemental haze. This exhibition marks Friedland’s third solo show with the gallery, and is on view from July 3, 2026 - August 9, 2026. 

Friedland’s scenes exist between somewhere and nowhere. Her work broaches the distance. Buoyed out across years, roadways and seasons, she frames a show within the soft architecture of memory. Her paintings travel with a low gaze; they illuminate a quietude that is both comforting and eerie. Through this fine dance Friedland expresses the core of a moment, both profoundly intimate and universal.

Friedland is painting the scene before impact. In doing so, she allows its internal charge to take center stage. There is a gravity to this sense of anticipation in her work: a set table before the diners arrive, windshields that frame the viewer in the passenger seat, common flowers, long stretches of wavering road, and figures defined by their elemental extensions (the burn on the tip of a cigarette, the spray of water from a garden hose). Throughout each scene an essential quality is communicated. The color and tone of this work is saturated and wistful, as if the artist has turned these sights over in her mind’s eye countless times. Friedland’s palette and paint flow freely, as if they are following the shift of the afternoon sun or water across a windshield. 

Light and its endless movement is a pillar of Friedland’s work. The paintings in Call When You Get There share a surface glimmer. Taking them in feels like squinting into the sprawling night or blinding summer sun. To integrate in the whole we must shift our gaze – letting parts recede into mist for the truth of a moment to come to the fore. Friedland’s work demonstrates that memory is its own place with its own time, both of and beyond our world.