Subterranean Smog is not one color or another, but a sickening miasma of grays, browns and a lingering smoky orange. Drawn from the bowels of the earth, SS identifies with the antihero — Pig Pen in Charlie Brown, Sir Gawain, the Green Knight, Alex from a Clockwork Orange, Lestat from the Vampire Chronicles. A self-proclaimed anarchist, apocryphal, and constantly distracted, the Great SS wanders the streets of Boise Idaho in search of the meaning of life. Once, for a moment in October of 1975 he thought he discovered it in the recesses of a cherry donut, but alas it was only a sugar rush.

In an attempt to counteract his saturnine nature, and to finally commit to being one solid hue, Subterranean Smog purchases thirteen burnt orange suits with matching socks the color of apricots. For the first time in his dingy life, SS commits to something, and the sheer fact of this gives him hope for the future.

Despite walking down Main Street in the full spectacle of an ever-brightening morning, wearing such garishness as would put Liberace to shame, Subterranean Smog still feels strangely invisible and nondescript. So, he hires a marching band to accompany him to the grocery store, then adorns his body with all manner of orange flowers, and even dips his body in saffron to garner some much-needed attention. But the fact of his inherent and unavoidable bleakness, smoggy and ill-suited to the rarified life, soon catches up with him.

Realizing he cannot change the truth of who he is and the permanent dinginess of his nature, SS decides instead to embrace it completely, marrying his High School sweetheart, Sky, and even going so far as to open a Smog Check Station in the center of an abysmal little town on the outskirts of nowhere.

  • Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004

  • Larry Pittman, Twelve Fayum From a Late Western Impaerium, 2013

  • Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1997

  • Joan Miró, The Birth of the World, 1975

  • Anish Kapoor, Arqueologia, Biologia, 2016

  • Albrecht Dürer, Young Hare, 1503

  • Leslie Hewitt, Sudden Glare of the Sun (installation view), 2012

  • Herald Nix, Untitled Shuswap Lake, B.C. #19 Oct. 12th 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery

  • Toba Khedoori, Untitled (hole), 2015