COL is proud to announce Salty and Dark, a solo exhibition of new works by Denver-based artist Noelle Phares, opening July 11th. Organized by Jordan Pieper, the exhibition marks a significant evolution in Phares’s practice, merging her signature exploration of the ecological with an intimate meditation on personal transformation and motherhood.

Phares is known for layered compositions that hold natural topographies and architectural frameworks in fragile tension—visualizing the entanglement between ecological beauty and human intervention. With degrees in biochemistry and environmental science, her work brings a scientist’s clarity and a painter’s intuition to bear on some of the most pressing environmental issues of today. Her landscapes depict places shaped by industrial expansion, energy infrastructure, or tourism—spaces where nature and human systems coexist, collide, and occasionally harmonize.

In Salty and Dark Phares turns inward. Created during and after a residency in southern France while pregnant with her first child, these works draw from the physical and emotional terrain of that experience. Expanding upon her preoccupation with the ecological and human interaction with the environment, this body of work is a meditation on motherhood, identity, and the femininity embedded in the land and life. Her palette is softer, alongside feminine symbolism–florals, felines, and female figures surface within her landscapes and architecture of the south of France is explored. “So much about that time felt salty and dark,” Phares reflects. “I was greatly unsettled by what I perceived to be the impending restrictions of motherhood… But after I met my little daughter, I realized that there was a lot of beauty in that precious time.” This deeply personal context is layered atop the ecological themes that remain central to her practice.

As she describes it: “People often remark at the seemingly unique marriage of abstract structure and landscape in my work. But in reality, that is what the world looks like these days: the stark break of a distant mountain view by the foreground shapes of the built environments we live in... I hope to both raise awareness of the fragile beauty of these places while also highlighting how beautiful and functional manmade design + nature can be if done with symbiosis, instead of nemesis, in mind.”

Salty and Dark offers viewers a unique convergence–the outer landscapes shaped by human touch and the inner landscapes shaped by transformation. This new body of work is both urgent and tender, intellectual and emotional—a reflection of an artist embracing complexity at every scale.

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