Sicardi Gallery hosts Green is the Colour, the gallery's first exhibition of works by Mexico City-based artist Melanie Smith. Including new paintings and video, the exhibition mines the associative and symbolic qualities of the color green, drawing from the artist's recent trips to the Amazon. Smith will be present at the opening reception, from 6-8 p.m. on Feb. 27. The gallery will also host a book signing with the artist at 11 a.m. on Feb. 28. 

Color and its myriad associations have been central to Smith's work since her earliest training as a painter. In several series, she uses monochromatic palettes, emphasizing the creation of color, its use, interpretations and symbolism within the urban context that informs her work. In her series Orange Lush, for example, Smith sought bright orange objects throughout Mexico City, using them as the basis for a series of photographs, installations and paintings that explored the ubiquity of the synthetic color.

The works included in Green is the Colour are based upon Smith's recent visit to a Ford town built in the Amazon in the 1920s. With its ambiguous relationship to nature, the color green indicates the power struggle between the colonization of the jungle and the forces that inevitably thwarted Ford's experiment.