Opening
July 11 2025
by Invitation Only

On View
July 12 – August 31 2025
by Appointment Only

Antica Terra
5100 SE Rice Lane
Amity, Oregon — 97101

Wednesday – Monday
10AM – 5PM

@antica_terra
www.anticaterra.com
meet@anticaterra.com

Amity, OR & Los Angeles, CA — Antica Terra and Marta are pleased to announce and present Slip Condition, a site-specific installation of new sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Lily Clark. A collaborative presentation co-hosted by the Southern California art gallery and Maggie Harrison’s otherworldly winery in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the exhibition explores the nature of fluid phenomena and its relationship to material surfaces that dissolve the boundary between the natural and the human-made, creating spaces where water can exist in and explore its own archetypal forms.

Named for a boundary state in fluid dynamics where liquid glides along a surface with minimal resistance, Slip Condition examines water at the edge of control—caught between its natural behaviors and engineered containment. As such, Clark’s works exist in cleaved focus, drawing on German researcher Theodor Schwenk’s distinction between water’s essential being and its measurable, manipulated form. In recent history, the engineered has eclipsed the elemental: water is increasingly subjected to the imperatives of industry, blasting, churning, and shooting through systems designed to harness its energy and meet exponential demand. This duality reflects the artist’s broader preoccupation with the collision of natural systems and human infrastructure. As industrial logic reshapes landscapes and reroutes rivers, water becomes both medium and metaphor—quantified and controlled, yet still pulsing with its own irreducible rhythms.

Here, in the quietude of Antica Terra’s 88-acre oak grove, water is returned to its fundamental embodiments, existing as pools, streams, and droplets that drip, ripple, and gyrate in vortical flows, encouraged into these elemental states by the use of carbon-based synthetic materials developed in the last decade and juxtaposed with mafic volcanic stones—basalt, scoria, pumice, and obsidian, all abundant throughout Oregon. These natural materials not only echo Earth’s eruptive past, but the possibilities of their future application as reparative instruments within the field of climate science (basalt, for example, has drawn attention for its interaction with carbon dioxide through natural re-mineralization processes). Clark works fluidly across this spectrum of material origin, alternately drawing directly from unaltered geological forms as well as the engineered, occasionally blending both. Within this purposefully muddy intersection, the artist transforms the Anthropocene into a geological layer: manmade substances redefine natural interactions as surface conditions, altering adhesion and movement while allowing water to slip, resist, or cling in unexpected yet tantalizingly familiar ways.

As one of the most volcanically active areas in the US, Oregon offers a particularly rich site of engagement for the artist. Antica Terra’s grove of Oregon White Oaks (Quercus garryana), a diverse area of the winery’s terrain studded by mossy trees and outcroppings of rocks—many of which contain marine fossils such as those of nautiluses, a reminder that this region was once the sea bottom of the Pacific Ocean—is the stage for a dozen works of various scales, so easeful in their surroundings that we question whether or not they have simply emerged, over millennia, from the ground beneath our feet.

As visitors begin their journey between the trees, guided by a meandering path that reflects the 200-foot concrete form of the winery’s Table in the Trees, they first encounter a series of small works positioned on cedar plinths (another material derived from the cornucopia of those available in the Pacific Northwest), the superhydrophobic coatings of which suspend their liquid charges with impossible precision. Further past the grove and into the clearing below, visitors encounter larger works, some of Clark’s most substantial to date, where surfaces of polished basalt and carbon-rich powder coatings, nearly indistinguishable from one another, play with perception and material expectation as they guide and deflect the movement of water. Wide steel bowls that are embedded in, balanced on, or suspended between angled rock surfaces, cradle fluid planes that oscillate between perfect stillness and constant, mesmerizing movement.

A bird bath, an homage and reference to the numerous bird houses that the former landowners hid and left amongst the trees, fills until it can bear no more, tipping—by a hand or its own weight—to empty. With steadfast attention to fluid dynamics and their most nuanced sensitivities, Clark achieves a material symbiosis that simultaneously marries and divorces our understanding of the properties of matter and, by extension, the physical universe.

About the Artist

Lily Clark is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist working across stone, ceramic, and metal to shape and contain water. Through close observation and successive experimentation, she seeks to illuminate the fundamentals of fluid dynamics. On the occasion of this inaugural summer program at Antica Terra, this is her first solo presentation with Marta Los Angeles, following her participation in the gallery’s lauded 2024 group exhibition Objects for a Heavenly Cave, curated by Krista Mileva-Frank.

About the Winery

Antica Terra is a 188-acre regenerative teaching farm and art center, home to native oak woodlands, seasonal waterways, biodynamic gardens and vineyards; producing chardonnay and pinot noir in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Here, winemaker Maggie Harrison dedicates space to creative exploration, to uncovering the universal principals that connect all forms of making. For details on exhibition events, visiting the winery, or acquiring our wines, kindly email → info@anticaterra.com