Lunar Dominion: Moon Series

Zack Smithey

62″ x 62″

Acrylic & Oil-based Enamel on Canvas

Zack Smithey’s Lunar Dominion: Moon Series extends the artist’s fascination with structure, perception, and controlled energy into a striking optical field. Unlike his gestural abstractions, this piece distills his interest in rhythm and spatial tension into a crisp black-and-white composition centered around a pulsing, dimensional sphere.

Placed against a stark black-and-white horizon, the sphere floats in a state of suspended gravity. This duality mirrors Smithey’s broader practice, where structure and spontaneity continually negotiate space. The gridded dot matrix across the sphere not only generates illusionistic volume but also serves as a meditation on pattern as language. What appears mechanical becomes intimate through subtle shifts in size, density, and spacing. The result is a celestial and architectural object that creates a hypnotic sense of expansion.

At first glance, the work recalls the legacy of Op Art pioneers such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, whose explorations of pattern, movement, and visual vibration challenged the boundaries of perceptual experience in the 1960s. Smithey harnesses that lineage yet pushes it toward a distinctly contemporary direction. The piece’s celestial reference nods to centuries of artists fascinated by astronomy and cosmology. Its optical surface aligns with 20th-century explorations of perception, from Bauhaus exercises in pattern to the perceptual experiments of the ZERO Group.

His mastery of controlled repetition resonates with the themes of Rhythmic Contours, Mash Gallery’s group exhibition exploring how contemporary artists activate movement, line, and spatial rhythm in their work.