Hawk & Hive Gallery is pleased to present Offerings, a two-person exhibition featuring recent paintings by Carrie Mae Smith and Michael Casey. Opening July 4, 2026, the exhibition brings together two distinct approaches to still life painting, united by a shared attentiveness to the objects and rituals that shape daily life.
Throughout the development of this body of work, Smith has returned to Emily Dickinson’s poem “All I may, if small” as a point of reference. The poem’s attention to scale and its regard for seemingly modest subjects finds a parallel in paintings of flowers arranged in small glasses, simple utensils, and well-used domestic objects. Through sustained observation, these works consider how ordinary things accumulate meaning, revealing traces of care, labor, memory, and daily ritual.
That attention to ordinary acts and objects also shaped the exhibition’s title, Offerings. Across cultures and throughout history, offerings have taken many forms: food placed on a table, flowers gathered in a vase, treasured objects passed from one hand to another. Through their respective approaches to still life painting, Casey and Smith examine the ways commonplace objects accrue significance over time. Attentive to the histories, rituals, and forms of care embedded in daily life, the artists present familiar things not as symbols, but as records of lived experience.