Elizabeth Leach Gallery

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Watch the virtual exhibition tour from November 4th to learn more about Windows, by Jinie Park, and Touching Matter, by MK Guth, up through December 31st.

Join us online Thursday, September 2nd, for a special screening of the film, I Snuck Off The Slave Ship, a 2019 Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival created by Lonnie Holley, Cyrus Moussavi, Brittany Nugent, and Matt Arnett. We will be screening the short film on a loop from 6:00 - 8:00 PM PDT on our website.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Barbara Sternberger. In this body of work titled Emanating, Sternberger embraces the constancy of change and each artwork contains the energetic record of their creation. The artist covers up the previous layers of her marks, obscuring any marks that she considers predetermined aesthetic decisions in favor of the pure expression that resulted from being intensely immersed in the present moment of their making.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Amanda Wojick’s Small Shields and Other Shapes featuring dynamic color gouache paintings and steel forms with paper material additions. Wojick’s practice intersects with sculpture, painting and collage and this new series of captivatingly indefinable shapes exemplify the progression of her abstract visual language.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present new wall sculptures, drawings and prints by Christine Bourdette that are inspired by geologic phenomena. Through dynamic material investigations Bourdette mimics the shapes, colors and tactile details of the accretions and erosions of earth’s metamorphosis. She considers concepts of geologic time analogous to our relatively shorter time experience as human beings. In this body of work Bourdette says she was interested in the “cumulative distortions, upheavals, erratic shifting of terrain, which seem to me metaphors for this era we inhabit, for a sense of surviving instability through instability. These reflections of and on land mirror a precarious, tactile world, as well as a capacity for transformation and resilience.”

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Julia Mangold’s new series of geometric graphite drawings featuring the remarkable complexity and restraint of her image-making process. Mangold is a Munich-born minimalist sculptor whose works on paper are created through precise technique and image construction. Her interest in formalism is evident throughout the series of hazy grey squares and rectangles, their edges forming a linear maze of negative space between them. Even the most subtle gradations of Mangold’s marks transmit volume, depth and softly glowing effects that resonate with physicality.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Bay Area painter Chester Arnold’s exhibition, Survivors, featuring a new series of exquisitely detailed oceanic scenes that delve into themes surrounding human presence in the natural world.   Arnold’s oil paintings are inspired by memory and imagination and he creates dreamlike images that combine realism and fantasy with meticulous specificity. The large and small scale recent works focus on maritime imagery that convey precarity and fortitude. Arnold distills entire worlds into each oil painting through depictions of expansive open seas, towering island sanctuaries populated with miniature houses, fishing boats caught in tumultuous whirlpools, or life raft remnants washed ashore.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present (Extra)ordinary: Reimagining the Everyday, a group exhibition of artworks inspired by observations and reinterpretations of the familiar. The show features artists who challenge preconceptions of the commonplace through unexpected visual interventions in sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. The exhibition includes an early Nari Ward sculpture, Woman, made of repurposed hoses that exemplifies his re-contextualization of found objects to confront social and political issues. Louise Bourgeois’ Autobiographical Series prints read like intimate notebook musings of daily life and motherhood through symbolic imagery and figuration. New photographs by Isaac Layman and recent drawings by Mario Gallucci reflect on the domestic realm through interior scenes that reveal something transcendent inside the quotidian. Malia Jensen’s short video Python, is an uncanny, meditative elegy to a housefly, while Claire Cowie and Leo Berk’s delightful sculptural collaboration, Endless Hug, made from repurposed materials, was inspired by ancient Byzantine niches.  

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Windows, new abstract works by Jinie Park that combine painting and sculpture, and feature radiant color washes on cut-out canvases. These works continue Park's formal and material explorations by exposing stretcher bars through square-shaped open areas of her stitched together muslin, cheesecloth and linen canvases. The painting surface’s deeply rich jewel tones and bright, pastel hues lyrically spill together at the edges to create soft geometric formations. 
Inspired by the observations of interior spaces and the seasonally shifting sunlight experienced from inside one’s home, this series of paintings visually transport the viewer. Portals and windows appear and invite wanderlust, daydreams and meditations on the present moment.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Touching Matter by MK Guth, an exhibition of new and recent works that highlight the artist’s interest in social rituals and the creation of circumstances that focus one’s attention. Guth’s multidisciplinary practice includes video, photography, sculpture, performance, and interactive exchange-based projects.   This series of works feature objects with implied performativity and the personal reflections that result from participatory engagement. A table is located at the center of the exhibit, and on the table are five artist-designed books titled 5,000 Pages on Love. Individual visitors are encouraged to sit and write answers to questions included inside the books, transforming the gallery into an intimate space for contemplation. Additional works include wall installations of the artist’s menus, handmade books of instructions for communal meals as well as related ink drawings that collectively reiterate the ways that objects possess memory and meaning.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Re:place, a vibrantly evocative series of landscape paintings by Stephen Hayes. The works evoke the natural world in brilliant layers of color and expressive mark-making. In his new body of work, Hayes uses Google Earth perspectives that recreate bodily vantage points. The artist finds digital views that resonate with his plein air painting process and the resulting scenes convey a sublime wonderment in beholding the power of the natural world. With conscious deliberation Hayes’s paintings gorgeously entangle abstraction, representation, and conceptual considerations. The scenes of fields, rivers, and forests unfold with prolonged engagement and his artworks often upend a viewer’s preconceptions. The sheer beauty of the imagery is immediately seductive while the title Re:place invites further contemplation on broader themes of renewal, reckoning or reconsiderations of our place within these bucolic settings.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Apprehension of Beauty, artist Gregg Renfrow’s latest artworks infused with color and light. Renfrow creates semi-transparent acrylic panels that feature layers of color that emerge from the center and emanate towards the edges of each composition. The luminescent shades, made from poured polymer and pigment, appear suspended in space.  In these new works, combinations of warm and cool striations form color fields that radiate ambient light and appear to glow from within. Each artwork is responsive to its environment’s surrounding light and possesses an aura of spirituality more commonly associated with natural phenomena like the ocean, sky, or a sunset. The artist’s exhibition title hints at a kind of ambivalence regarding the trappings of traditional beauty in favor of an intangible, enigmatic experience.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to highlight Jacob Hashimoto’s prints from the series titled The Necessary Invention of the Mind. The multilayered color works on paper combine relief and silkscreen and will be on view in the gallery and online to celebrate Hashimoto's recent large-scale installation at the Portland International Airport. The prints feature Hashimoto’s signature kite imagery in dynamic compositions that reference virtual space, natural environments and cosmology.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Monuments and Memorials, a new series of large-scale photo weavings by Dinh Q. Lê that reflect on collective memory and architectural commemoration. Lê’s evocative photographic artworks combine interior and exterior pictures of Cambodian sites and pair the seemingly unresolvable, competing narratives of a country’s past and present. Interlaced vertical and horizontal strips of documentary photographs juxtapose grandiose ancient Angkor temples with sparse interior rooms of the Tuol Sleng Museum and other memorial locations marred by the violence inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). Warm, golden-hued pictorial tapestries belie the painful legacy of the empty torture rooms. The weaving process of the artist’s photographic constructions physically intertwine narratives to reiterate the dichotomous nature of cultural memory.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Lonnie Holley’s atmospheric, dream-like painted works on paper that feature repeated, overlapping silhouettes and three-dimensional effects. Titled The Influence of Images, this new series of paintings were created during Holley’s artist-in-residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, NY in 2020. During his time there he made artworks layered with spray paint and acrylic, adding an immediacy to the imagery. Nested shapes appear to radiate and float in the cosmos amid a softly diffused palette of grays, pinks, blues, and yellows that emphasize their transformative, mystical quality.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Northwest painter Kavin Buck’s latest series of artworks that combine realism and abstraction through luscious hues and multilayered brushstrokes. Buck’s large-scale paintings transmit the atmospheric quality of seasonal weather shifts while his black and white artworks experiment with charcoal, graphite, and gesso mark-making.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Recent Work by Lee Kelly, featuring steel sculptures, cast bronze forms and figurative watercolors. The exhibition focuses on new works inspired by past writings, musings and studies found inside the pages of the artist’s studio sketchbooks.

Judy Cooke’s exhibition, Form First, highlights the artist’s exploration of shape and dimensionality through new minimalist wall constructions. Spatial relationships are central concerns to the artist, and precise considerations inform the physicality of her artworks. Extending only two inches from the wall, these wood and aluminum shapes cast distinct shadows while painted edges reiterate their “objectness” and formal presence.

Charlene Liu's exhibition, Lattice, explores two aspects of her art practice: mark-making and image-making. Liu's recent watercolors and unique woodcut prints are thematically connected by floral imagery and highlight the diverse considerations of medium specificity. The exhibition reveals the artist's complementary approaches between the mindful deliberations of printmaking techniques and the observational immediacy of line seen in her plein air style paintings. 

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Awake Under Vines, the latest series of large-scale paintings by Ryan Pierce, featuring artworks that combine an electrified palette with allusions to environmental activism and radical resistance. In these new works, Pierce continues to illuminate relationships between the human and natural world through dynamic dreamlike imagery infused with moral complexity and wonderment. 

Alexis Day, Faceted: Time and Expectations highlights new fabric tapestries by the artist that continue her exploration of surrealistic imagery through allegory and three-dimensional space.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Michelle Ross, I Am Your Signal, an exhibition of new boldly-colored abstract paintings. Ross’s paintings satisfyingly challenge the static experience of viewing through her enlivened, lush palette and dynamic formal considerations.

The Print Wall: Alison Saar   Alison Saar’s suite of eight multi-block linocuts titled "Copacetic," 2019, are printed on handmade Japanese Hamada Kozo paper and hand-inked in a palette of deep reds, blues and yellows. Inspired by the Harlem-125th Street subway station’s wrought ironwork and designs from the African diaspora, Saar pays tribute to the African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance through panoramic scenes of imagined dancers, singers, musicians and patrons enjoying Harlem’s heyday of the 1930-40s.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present new photographs by Christopher Rauschenberg that feature dynamic combinations of single-image and multi-image pictures of archways, buildings, and temples taken during the artist's travels through India in early 2020. Rauschenberg's pictures are inspired by a lifelong commitment to observation. His intuitive photographs transmit the sensory experience of being there through imagery that suggests quiet contemplation or active wonderment, and this new India series communicates a sense of solitude that allows space for one's own reflections.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present A Postcolonial Landscape by Modou Dieng, featuring paintings that explore themes of Black representation and erasure in a globalized society. Dieng reimagines his own experience through dazzling, idiosyncratic mixed media artworks that engage in dialogue with personal narratives and Eurocentric art history.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Ed Bereal: Studio Studies - Survey of Drawings 1958 - 2020, featuring small and large scale drawings and collage created over six decades. The show highlights Bereal's work on paper from early figurative and abstract artworks to recent drawings that focus on socio-political themes of racial inequity and corruption in the United States.    Ed Bereal's distinctive visual language combines illustration, pop art, abstraction, holography and assemblage, and the new exhibition delves into the artist's foundational practice of mark-making. Drawing has always been a primary modality and way of thinking for Bereal, exemplified through pictures on view that range from energetic sketches, portraits and collage (1958-64), to politically charged depictions of the present day rendered in graphite. Perhaps most significantly, the works included in the exhibition make visible the artist's ideas, decision-making, discoveries and inner dialogue.

Jeremy Okai Davis's Black Wood marks the gallery's first exhibition with the artist and presents new paintings featuring actors and models from Jet magazines in the 1950s - 60s. Davis's stylistic figuration employs a kind of pixelation/pointillist hybridization that references photography while highlighting painterly brushstrokes. His deep affection for painting is evidenced through imagery that uniquely synthesizes portraiture and expressionistic mark-making.   In this new work, Davis spotlights Black women in Hollywood that were not widely recognized for their talents during the time they were working in the entertainment industry. The series also continues his exploration of racial bias through the history of "Shirley cards," a system used to calibrate skin tones during film processing.

Mark R. Smith's new intricately collaged paintings convey contemporary and historical narratives through an abstract visual language. Dome, diamond, circle and starburst shapes emerge from linear woven strips that were cut, mitered, and reconfigured into interlocking patterns that transmit an exquisite, symbiotic beauty.   Inspired by writings on utopian societies proposed by French philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Smith investigates symmetry and "the promise of ecstatic visual harmony." The artist became particularly interested in Fourier's plans for mirrored housing structures known as phalansteries, an idealized living space where members could pursue individual passions and share resources while enjoying gender and social equality.

Malia Jensen’s multimedia art practice focuses on natural cycles, the human form and connections with nature. Her works are often visual metaphors that encourage multiple readings from the viewer. The title Eremocene references philosopher and biologist E.O. Wilson’s theory about humankind’s impending “Age of Loneliness” after the rapid decline of the planet’s biodiversity, and Jensen’s related themes of erasure and transformation in this body of work.

Claire Cowie’s exhibition In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere explores loss, death and undefined spaces beyond our understanding. Cowie says the work investigates, “the ways in which we make meaning, impose order, and celebrate finding beauty in unanticipated places.” Most of the works including sculptures, are made entirely from paper. Triangular shaped or imperfect scraps of paper highlight the artist’s idiosyncratic style and palette combinations of brilliant hues and dark earth tones. 

In Eschatologies, Matthew Picton exhibits new three-dimensional framed paper sculptures that interweave historical and contemporary images from paintings, photographs, books and film. Eschatology is defined as a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world, and the plural version in the exhibition title proposes an ongoing multiplicity of narratives. In this series, Picton engages with themes of mortality, impermanence, destruction and oppression in societies past and present. The artist explores the cyclical nature of calamitous ideologies throughout human civilization and illuminates hidden truths within dominant cultural histories.

New artworks from Melody Owen's collage series, Are you animal – vegetable – or mineral? will be presented in our backroom gallery. In these intimate works, Owens considers how we, as humans, differentiate ourselves from the rest of the natural world. Using the medium of collage to create fantastical human forms physically synthesized with shells, flowers, crystals, and animals, the artist constructs a visual allegory representing the desire for earthly connection.


Anna Von Mertens is renowned for her painstakingly detailed textiles and drawings that traverse enigmatic intersections of space through auras, star mapping and pictorial symbology. In Nature and Other Relationships, Von Mertens explores the virtual and the real through vibrantly colored, large-scale drawings of emoji ideograms. Her new works emphasize connections between the electronic and the natural world and the ways complex relationships are mediated in the exchange.

Mary Henry (1913-2009) gained recognition late in her career for her reductive, geometric abstractions with activated, graphic palettes. Henry’s Mondrian-inspired grid works and offbeat neo-Constructivist style was influenced by the Bauhaus School's formal ideas and her teacher László Moholy-Nagy's fascination with pure expressiveness through line and color.  

In SunTests, Seattle-based painter Jaq Chartier's new series of dye sublimation prints on aluminum are time-based "image captures" of the artist's ongoing explorations of material phenomena. Chartier's unique process-based practice shares a visual language with Color Field painting and combines her fascination with materiality, time, and conditions. Inspired by DNA gel electrophoresis (a technique for separation and analysis of macromolecules and their fragments), her work is about discovery and pairs scientific investigations with conceptual themes of impermanence.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present The Quiet Show, featuring a selection of 20 process-oriented artists whose transcendent artworks evoke stillness and contemplation.

Los Angeles-based artist Lacey Stoffer creates vibrant, abstract oil paintings on raw linen canvases with additions of charcoal and stitched thread. The exhibition Rumination features her new series of visual meditations inspired by musings on natural world phenomena and the passage of time.  Stoffer translates her ongoing contemplations and observations through active mark-making and considerations of bodily scale. She is deeply interested in pentimento, the visible traces of process through surface layers, which can be seen in swirling circular shapes, smudged velvety black charcoal lines, or animated erasures. Throughout the series, Stoffer builds on a singular form, morphing shapes and shifting colors through serial repetition, where brightly colored terrestrial formations expand and multiply. Lacey Stoffer was born in Portland, OR and now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013. Her large scale abstract paintings often incorporate organic forms on raw linen to play with the formal qualities of balance and middle ground. Stoffer has shown work in solo and group exhibitions at Pacific Design Center (West Hollywood, CA), 1019WEST (Inglewood, CA) and the Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA).

In Cascade - Synapse and Satin, Alexis Day investigates perception and memory through three-dimensional tapestry constructions. Day studied psychology during her undergraduate studies before transitioning to an art practice and her dream-like imagery reflects a multidisciplinary approach that combines photographic printing on fabric with embroidered and sculptural details. The artist's psychologically charged pictures act as portals into mysterious domestic and exterior scenes that invite us to peer down a steep flight of stairs, enter into a hallway, or peek inside a living room. Dramatic vantage points combine with tactile materiality and underscore the visceral tension between pictorial and dimensional space. Day's voluminous artworks comprised of jewel-toned, draping fabrics suggest the collapse, shifts and tenuousness of memory while trompe l'oeil effects implicate the viewer in the exchange.  Alexis Day is a Portland-based mixed media artist, originally from the coastal town of Bandon, Oregon. Using her background in psychology, she investigates the impact of perception and memory on individual and cultural identity. Day earned an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2019, a BS in Art Practices from Portland State University in 2016 and a BS in Psychology from the University of Oregon in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Putting it Together 2, at the Foundry (St. Charles, MO), Figuratively Speaking at the Liberty Arts Collective (Bend, OR) and Dismantled, a solo exhibition at the Lodge Gallery (Portland, OR).