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 from the stage, a calling…, an exhibition of recent paintings by Jeremy Okai Davis. This new body of work explores the rich history of Black performance, drawing inspiration from the vibrant worlds of comedy, music, vaudeville and even magic. Davis seeks to capture the resilience, creativity, and joy that Black performers have brought to the stage, often against the backdrop of systemic oppression. Performance, for many Black artists, has always been more than just entertainment—it’s been a powerful form of expression, resistance, and identity. The parallels between this and his practice are undeniable. As a visual artist he feels inclined to educate himself through research and turn that into the performance of creation and exhibition much like this, from the stage, a calling emerges, where laughter, music, and movement become tools for expression and subversion. This calling is not just about the act of performance but about the deeper responsibility to reflect the complexities of the Black experience. For those who answered this call, the stage became a platform to challenge stereotypes, break boundaries, and create new narratives. Through his work, Davis aims to honor that legacy, capturing the spirit and impact of those who have used performance to reshape history. Comedy and music, especially, have been powerful tools for survival, allowing Black artists to navigate and challenge racial stereotypes. Comedy specifically has allowed an honest critique of American politics, culture, as well as, analysis of Black lifestyles, be them positive or seemingly negative. Davis uses bold colors, dynamic compositions, text and symbolic imagery to evoke the energy and emotion of these performers, who used their talents not only to entertain but to redefine cultural norms. His work reflects on the duality of performance as both a means of survival and a space for subversion. By referencing historical figures like Bert Williams, Dick Gregory, and Butterfly McQueen, Jeremy Okai Davis wants to honor their legacy while questioning how the complexities of race, performance, and identity continue to shape Black artistry today. In capturing the spirit of these performers, the artist hopes to create a visual dialogue that bridges the past and present, celebrating the brilliance of Black creativity while acknowledging the barriers it has faced. Jeremy Okai Davis (b. Charlotte, NC) received a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, NC. Davis relocated to Portland, OR in 2007 where he has continued his studio practice in addition to working as a graphic designer and illustrator. His work has been shown nationally at the Studio Museum of Harlem (New York, NY), THIS Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Wa Na Wari (Seattle, WA) and The Rotating Art Program at Portland International Airport (Portland, OR). Davis's work resides in the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon's permanent collection. Elizabeth Leach Gallery began representing Davis's work in 2019.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Gravid: Tides of Becoming, an exhibition of recent mixed media works by Alexis Day. This new body of work extends Day’s interest of creating mixed media “tapestries” that amalgamate personal photographs with fabric substrates, hand stitching, paint and other unexpected materials like reflective plastics. Fleeting figures and line drawing made by thread can be found embedded amongst the curious grounds of these image/objects. The foundational imagery of interior and exterior sites were all visited and captured by the artist herself. The locations have both intimate and aesthetic meaning, and with the depiction of spiraling staircases and Escher-like architecture, these stunning works make for an optically curious puzzle that is rewarded by close study,] and intend to communicate a story of transition, transit, and transformation. The majority of the images were taken during stints at prestigious residencies in the Southern United States; Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina specifically. The seascapes depicting driftwood and seaweed were gathered during visits to the coast of the Pacific Northwest, and together, spin a tale that speaks to the inexorable bookends of life and death, motherhood, and perhaps the plastic notion of tourism. The currency of domestic labor is also a theme suggested by the intricate techniques and processes of up-cycling clothing and fabric sourced from loved ones and family members throughout her lifetime, imbuing things made with the hand with even more touch. Day’s background in psychology led her wanting to blend that scholarship with a studio practice which explores the memory of experience through place, a subject she has been probing at least since she received her degree in 2019. Despite being small in scale, Day’s careful juxtaposition of science and art creates fascinating work that calls for actual physical space to absorb their gigantic vibrations. Alexis Day is a Portland-based 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). In 2020, Day was an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA). Elizabeth Leach Gallery began representing Day’s work in 2020.

October 3 - November 2, 2024 First Thursday reception: October 3, 5:30 - 7:30 pm Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Figuring Luck, an exhibition of recent works by Ann Hamilton. This new series of porcelain enamel portraits, produced with vintage scanning tools, expands upon the body of Hamilton’s ongoing work with alternative photographic modes of capture. The subjects of Hamilton’s Figuring Luck are the roughly rendered forms of the ‘Fève’, miniature hand-painted ceramic figures traditionally baked into king’s cake for the Epiphany holiday. For the person who finds the figure in their cake, it signals luck and prosperity, and in some traditions, they are crowned queen or king for the day. While the literal translation of ‘fève’ is ‘bean’, the tradition has taken many forms, from the use of beans, to plastic king’s cake babies, to what Hamilton has captured in the portraits of Figuring Luck. The title takes its inspiration from this history, however, what interests Hamilton in the magnification of these inch-high sculptures is the expressive quality of these minimally articulated figures, scanned and cropped in conventional portrait proportions. This is the latest series within the larger body of Hamilton’s image work using the vintage flatbed scanner as a photographic tool. The shallow depth of field produced by the scan creates an atmosphere pronouncing the voluminous character of the objects as shadow and blur, while simultaneously bringing into sharp focus the points at which the figure touches the glass. This dynamic shifting, between soft and hard lines, between light and shadow, is replicated in the shift between miniature and gigantic, as theses figures, who once began as small cartoonish abstractions, are now rendered as nearly human-scale, bringing with them all that is minimally necessary to form the recognition of a figure: the hint of an eye or an arm, a grin or a frown, and perhaps to suggest an emotion of contentment or melancholy. Hamilton turns her interest in the relation between the animate and the inanimate, the miniature and the gigantic, toward figuring the figure itself. A related work of gigantic puppet-like figures will open in the Winter of 2024/25 as part of Seattle’s Public Art Program. Ann Hamilton is internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations, performance collaborations, print media, and public projects—most notably the 2017 project for the MTA subway at the World Trade Center. Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal for the Arts, the MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Hamilton represented the United States in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world, including a museum-wide installation at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA) in 2015 and 1992. Her work is included in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, OH), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), among many others.

September 5 - November 2, 2024 Opening reception: Thursday, September 5, 2024 Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Barbara Sternberger. The process of solving while doing is central to Sternberger’s thinking in this new body of work entitled Continuum, almost as if she plans to get lost in order to find her way back home. This deliberate, studio-oriented strategy generates imagery that unabashedly reveals a history of making, full of erasure and accumulation, which together create a portrait of an artist in production. A figure is oblique, forms and shapes abbreviated, compositions are simultaneously full and incomplete, reminding you perhaps of something once imagined then forgotten. Heroic gestures can still occur at an easel, and Sternberger's works have a psychic energy their physical size can barely contain. And they are hard to pin down, like articulating the experience of hearing great music in an amphitheater; beauty ricocheting off uncontrollable surfaces and entering you through more than one opening all at once. A subtle euphoria that can only happen while closely studying the unknown. The layers are gauzy, a pile up of thick and thin marks, scratchy, sometimes even muscular but without flexing. Distant whispers of pencil scrawl are imbued yet still visible from within their fleshy surfaces. And the color: creamy spreads of ochres, bone whites, tiny shocks of crimson and unexpected blues populate a carefully curated playground of pictorial space by which the viewer is invited to certify with vaguely abstract terms. Formal issues such as color, light and space are set in balance with internal visions generated by personal experience. This all tracks when thinking of her allegiance to certain conceptual and aesthetic concerns set up by the Color Field and Abstract Expressionist painters before her. Sternberger operates within a somewhat ephemeral painting sphere, a state of could be finished, and as the artist says, “hangs in the balance between mind and experience”. Like any serious work of art, hers is best experienced in real-time and with an open mind, because the unpredictability of seeing, being and feeling in front of a significant event is vital to any consequential human experience. Barbara Sternberger received her MFA from the University of California at Irvine. She lives in Bellingham, Washington and is a part-time lecturer and painting instructor at Western Washington University. She has exhibited both regionally and nationally, and her paintings are included in numerous private and public collections. Sternberger has presented nine solo exhibitions to date with Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR. Her paintings have been the subject of two solo museum exhibitions: at the Museum of Northwest Art, and at the Whatcom Museum. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including Curator's Perspective (Whatcom Museum of Art, 2015); Elles (Seattle Art Museum Gallery, 2012); Show of Hands: Northwest Women Artists 1880 - 2010 (Whatcom Museum of Art, 2010); and the U.S. Art in Embassies Program (US State Department). In 2010 she was the Betty Bowen Awards, Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award Winner.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Michelle Ross, Never an Even Folding, an exhibition of new, exuberant paintings which continue to refine her particular abstract language concerned with such notions as field and particle, dichotomous color schemes, and the treacherous poetry intrinsic to the project of abstract painting. Diptychs take center stage, extending her fascination with codependency, doubling, and the kind of imperfect symmetry reminiscent of a Rorschach card. This compositional device is used to graduate differences and create porous boundaries between competing or varied formal strategies. Within these paintings, Ross gives careful attention to edges, evidence of a real-time editing process akin to a photographer’s search for composition in a darkroom. But here, revealing the very deletions end up uniting, rather than dividing, fields of color, often sourced from a vast collection of paper scraps and color mixing notebooks. Ross’s working methods are ultimately improvisational, but loose organizational strategies suggest cartography, geometry, and architecture as starting points. These compositional tools propel a hero’s journey bent on the exploration of Modernist painting tropes—techniques and the various worlds that live inside of painting. Thin washes of shimmering pigments are sprayed, stained, masked, and puddled across finely woven linen, canvas, and panel surfaces. Ghostly traces of graphite and the like occur not necessarily as a means of planning but a form of naked mark-making that lie semi-buried within stained swathes of ebullient color. Her work engages painting’s central ingredients such as touch, flatness, viscosity, etc. and celebrates the happy collision of planning and accident. Michelle Ross examines the boundaries between painting, photography and popular media, creating new relationships, both conceptual and aesthetic, that mirror the shifting realities of our time. Her formal and abstract painting, as well as digital collages and textile work, have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (Boston, Massachusetts), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) and Rome International University (Rome, Italy). Her work resides in several collections, including the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Rhode Island School of Design Special Collections (Providence, RI) and the Four Seasons Hotel (Abu Dhabi, UAE), among others. In 2012, Ross was named as a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. Her commission in 2020 of four massive site-specific paintings each measuring 16 feet tall by seven feet wide for The Standard Insurance Company (Portland, OR) marks her largest-scale project to date.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is also excited to present MK Guth, Distant Dreamer, an exhibition of new multi-media works that recall and expand upon recent and ongoing projects within the artist’s wide-reaching oeuvre. In this impressive gathering of recent work, Guth has revisited her own archive and cherry-picked some of the classic material and thematic highlights that have helped define her output over the last 30 years. Full of adjacent tangents and aestheticized renditions, the result is what one could call a “performance” by an indomitable artist very much connected to her own thesis. Her forms and gestures seem endless, but there are certain strands that remain constant, one of these signatures being her use of fibers. Guth assumed this thread again to create two stunning, braided tapestries that refer to specific galaxies as observed from Earth. These knotted, wall-mounted reliefs are loaded with sensuous tangles and a patina developed by being bent out of shape through the laborious process of articulating forms outside of their material’s intended use. Guth’s work often contains strong performative elements, eventuating into objects and ephemera that are activated by social contact, but here she turns to a solitary studio practice that emphasizes a more literal application of materials, and the consequent production of discrete, disparate sculptures. Among them includes an ongoing series of work that involves repurposed chandeliers. Dangling shoulder height and embellished with found and clashing pendalogues, these gaudy relics of yesteryear wear opulence in abject defiance - their utility minimized, grandiosity tamped and our physical relationship to them confused. Taken all together, we see an artist’s cosmic musing and navel-gazing manifest. Small shifts in what is familiar amplify human presence and speak to the intricacies of social relations in MK Guth’s work. Guth is a visual artist working in sculpture, performance and interactive projects. She has exhibited and performed with numerous galleries and institutions in the US and abroad including, The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, Boise Art Museum, Yerba Buena, in San Francisco, Henry Art Museum, Seattle, WA, and the Art Museum of Sonoma, Santa Rosa, CA, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, The Melbourne International Arts Festival, Australia, Nottdance Festival, Nottingham, England, Swiss Institute, NYC, Gallery-Pfeister, Gudhjem Denmark, Franklin Parrasch Gallery NYC, White Columns, NYC, The Art Production Fund (NYC / Las Vegas), and the Akron Art Museum, Ohio. She is a recipient of a Ford Family Foundation Fellowship, Bonnie Bronson Award, a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award through the Seattle Art Museum and an Award of Merit from the Bellevue Art Museum. Guth is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland OR and Cristin Tierney, NYC. Guth is Emeritus faculty at the Pacific Northwest College at Willamette University in Portland Oregon.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to feature a new series of paintings on canvas and paper by self-taught artist Lonnie Holley. This is the gallery’s third one-person show with the artist. Painting has been integral to Holley’s forty-year career as a visual artist, and The Movement of Thought: Paintings & Works on Paper consists of new works made with spray paint, oil sticks, gesso and acrylic. Each employs a laborious stenciling technique that unites fragmented silhouettes into wonderfully optical compositions. The exhibition is a continuation of a series he began as a resident at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, NY in 2020. Imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, Holley's multi-media practice incorporates places, people, and events. The work is furious, necessary, urgent—always searching and never stopping. Lonnie Holley has exhibited nationally and internationally, with a forthcoming exhibition at the Camden Art Centre, London. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the world, including The Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and many others. His works are also permanently displayed in the United Nations and exhibited in the White House Rose Garden. The artist lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

For the month of June, the gallery is also excited to present a suite of recent works by Bean Gilsdorf as part of our Project Wall program, which spotlights recent prints and photographs by contemporary artists.  As a fourth-generation seamstress, Gilsdorf uses textiles to create collages, sculptures, and photographs that serve as malleable engagements with historic events along with cultural and political constructs. Her multi-media works explore the relationship between image, object, and narrative through a feminist lens. Working with appropriated images and texts, Gilsdorf creates sculptures and performances that delve into historical narratives, the iconography of authority, and the ways in which representations influence our perception of cultural values. Gilsdorf invites us to consider the limits of power such images have, the point at which they become diffused and illegible, and the absurdity that arises when they are ignored. Gilsdorf will present the lecture-performance Epistemics for Artists for the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial on June 15 at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. She invites the audience to consider the relationship between artist, community, and city. This staging of Gilsdorf’s first performance in Portland is inspired by her own experiences as an artist and builds on her groundbreaking 2021 city-wide study “Seeing Visual Artists” as well as her five years of work as an arts-advice columnist. Gilsdorf’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in England, Italy, China, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and South Africa. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Gilsdorf is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship (2024), a Ford Family Foundation Fellowship Residency at Ucross (2023), an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2020) and two creative Fulbright Fellowships to Poland (2015-16 and 2016-17). She currently lives in Portland, OR.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Waiting for the Sun to Fall, Northwest painter Kavin Buck’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. A suite of bold new large-scale paintings seize the gallery walls and oscillate between realism and abstraction with a deliberate, hand-hewn energy. They each obliquely reflect their origin of creation, pointing to spaces real and imagined by use of concentrated hues, distinctive brushwork and dramatic mark-making; signature distinctions of Buck’s flourishing oeuvre. Their intricacies reward close study by way of brush striations which describe the gravity that divides land and sky within a vaguely familiar landscape. Larger scale works made with a more dramatic application of brush strokes recall the romantic vistas of the Pacific Northwest and create an enveloping field the viewer can disappear into. The effect can be both aquatic and terrestrial through his masterful use of glazing techniques. The more intimate watercolors - more wrist then elbow - are created in the lush West Coast style. Though primarily abstract in tone, they allude to elements of the representational world and speak in rhyming cadence with the more heroic acrylic paintings which share the room. Kavin Buck received his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) and his BFA from the Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA). He attended the American University/Parsons School of Design in Paris (France) and completed post-graduate studies with the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (New York, NY). In 1990-91 he was a member at the PS1/MoMA National and International Studio Program. Buck’s artwork is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon and has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), La Estacion Arte Contemporaneo (Chihuahua, MX), Los Angeles Contemporary Gallery (catalog with an essay by Ed Schad), University of Virginia Art Museum (Charlottesville, VA), Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), The Drawing Center (New York, NY), and the PS1Museum (Long Island City, NY). His works are included in many public, private, and corporate collections in the US and internationally.

In City of Apparitions, Matthew Picton will debut six new three-dimensional framed hand cut paper sculptural assemblages that continue his fascinating ability to magnify - conceptually and technically - the slippery intersections of history, religion, culture and art. If art is the cousin of scholarship, Picton is his own distinct brand of scholar. Here, Federico Fellini takes center stage as Picton’s subject, in particular his films Roma and Satyricon, both of which assume the city of Rome as the filmmaker’s signature backdrop and principle protagonist. Fellini’s imprint upon contemporary Rome and his sly interpretation of its history informs this stunning suite of Picton’s latest sculptural assemblages. This artist’s revisitation of the Vatican and the ancient empire through the lens of this great artist is in itself a kind of collaboration; a postmodern recollection of history. In this Fellini inspired series, work is summoned on a glorious scale, which is vibrant in color, and complex in composition; a veritable “carnival” for the eyes. Through his meticulous process of research, cutting up and rearranging architectural drawings and related advertisements in a quilt-like process, adjacent to a cubist approach. His works have the feel of bas-relief, an almost topological experience. An image object. They are comprised of real and imagined renderings borrowed from printed images which are painstakingly excised from historical documents then reconstructed into a fractured, new visual narrative. Faces of the past float amongst the compositions. In the reflection of their frames you can see your own, incidentally becoming a three-way collaboration; a “mirror” of Classical antiquity, no better expressed than in his epic work entitled Rome, the penultimate confluence of histories, past and present. Picton is known for his increasingly complex, multi-dimensional, sculptural map cut-outs, and this series expands beyond the cartographic element. The artist continues to create rich visual narratives, and his extraordinarily dynamic sculptural creations collapse historical timelines through carefully constructed layers of paper and vellum. Born in London, England, Matthew Picton studied politics and history at the London School of Economics. His work is included in the collections of the de Young Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Herbert Museum of Art (Coventry, UK), the Fidelity Bank collection (London, UK), the Stadt Museum (Dresden, Germany) and the New York University Langone Medical Center Collection (New York, NY).

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to feature Ryan Pierce in his eighth show with the gallery. This exhibition, entitled Improbable Springs, is bursting with vibrant color and imaginative compositions as the artist repositions humanity’s role on earth. Pierce’s work stimulates the imagination through the wide array of human objects which remain present while celebrating nature’s ability to carry on in spite of us. Pierce has become known for his climate conscious paintings depicting the near future where nature has begun to thrive again in the absence of humanity as we currently know it. The evidence of human beings are present only in the items left behind, now overrun and forgotten in tangles of vines or blooming flowers. Pierce’s work speaks to the resiliency of nature and these themes are carried on in his newest paintings. Improbable Springs is primarily inspired by a six week hike Pierce went on in 2018, traveling from Phoenix, AZ to Silver City, NM. The natural springs scattered along the way were his primary source of water on his journey through the Southwest. The aesthetic of these secluded springs - sometimes marked by wayfinders such as fence posts, stacks of rocks or nothing at all - significantly influenced this new body of work. Water is depicted in many of the paintings, its significance undeniable. The imagery hints at the possibility of past flooding, lingering puddles, possible drought, spartan spigots amidst the wildflowers. There is something hopeful in a future where these springs still exist, that nature continues to persist in these significant ways despite the accelerating climate crisis. Ryan Pierce received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007, and a BFA from Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2003. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (Portland, OR), Nine Gallery (Portland, OR) and at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (Trondheim, Norway). His work has also been shown in group exhibitions at the Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), STREAM Gallery (New York, NY), the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA) and at Irvine Contemporary (Washington, DC). In 2019, Pierce was selected to participate in the inaugural exhibition of the Portland Art Museum's regional triennial titled the map is not the territory.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to present Peter Gronquist's exhibition Light Record. In this new body of work Gronquist has created a series of elegant, gestural abstractions that seamlessly combine the fundamental compositional protocols of both painting and photography, while simultaneously questioning the categorical imperatives that seem to arbitrarily define and separate the two mediums. Intrigued by the possibility of capturing and freezing something as ineffable and fugitive as a flicker of light, Gronquist set out to harness the basic elements of the photographic process and situate them within the more expressive, haptic tendencies of painting. The result is a near-perfect fusion of painting's signature autographic "stroke" and the more anonymous, almost mechanic registration associated with the bulk of photographic reproduction and its myriad effects. Beginning the process in a custom DIY darkroom of his own design, Gronquist used light sensitive photo-paper and a long, narrow LED light-stick as his respective canvas and paint brush. Equal parts conductor's baton and necromantic wand, Gronquist wields the LED light-stick so that it becomes an extension of his own hand/eye/wrist relay-system or even a prosthetic appendage in its own right. Hovering over the blank photo-paper, the light glides across its frictionless surface in a kind of rhythmic, ritualized benediction. Although there is no camera, no negative, and no actual photography involved, once Gronquist subjects the photo-paper to his own chemical process, vaporous images begin to materialize and take shape. Instantly calling to mind unfurling manuscripts, swirling musical notations, Renaissance curtains and drapery, or the doppler traces of action in Étienne-Jules Marey's early motion studies achieved with his “chronophotographic gun.” As these shadowy, wraith-like forms double back and fold into each other, Gronquist is able to finesse and pull our eyes into a deep illusionistic space without the aid of receding horizon lines or any of the dimensional tropes commonly associated with Classical painting. Peter Gronquist received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. He is a multidisciplinary artist working in diverse mediums and materials ranging from video and painting to sculpture and site-specific installations in our natural and built environment. Based in Portland, Oregon, Gronquist draws inspiration from the pastoral sensibility and rural backdrop of the Pacific Northwest to create work inflected by a sense of rough poetry and impermanence. Gronquist has exhibited in galleries and fairs across the globe, most recently at Converge 45, Portland; Untitled Art, Miami Beach; Central Server Works, Los Angeles; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland; Oregon Contemporary, Portland; Belmont Hotel, Dallas, TX; Las Ventas, Sharon, CT; Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco; Winston Wachter, Seattle/NYC; bitforms, NYC; and PRIMARY., Miami.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Anna Von Mertens’s exhibition Elements and Objects, which brings together two new bodies of work created meticulously with colored pencils on black paper. One series references the cosmos while the other is sourced from the digital world. Both speak to how these abstract realms are tangibly present in our everyday lives. In her series Remnants, Von Mertens devised an iterative process to create each drawing that references the generative life cycles of stars. She arranged tangles of jewelry on sun-sensitive paper into forms reminiscent of cosmic phenomena. Exposing these arrangements to the sun, a chemical reaction occurred anywhere sunlight hit the paper, creating a record of both where the jewelry was in full contact with the paper and where the jewelry lifted slightly from it. Von Mertens used these patterns of touch points and slippages as sketches, then refined them into finished drawings using metallic pencils against black backgrounds. This step-by-step creation is a testament to the connection between all things - each of us is a slow gathering of stardust - yet with each step the preceding steps recede. The three drawings from Von Mertens’s continuing series Objects (100 Emojis) use pattern to animate the symbols that populate our phones. In one drawing, items of mending, tending, cutting, and repairing repeat in a diagonal cascade. In another, the repeated shapes of four emojis are arranged to echo the geometry of the traditional Tumbling Blocks quilt pattern. Giving these objects hours of attention with her careful rendering, Von Mertens offers the reminder that these images in our phones are as much a part of this world as anything else. We share the same ecosystem. In both aspects of her show Von Mertens finds value in pulling remote worlds closer, making distant realms feel more present. Experiencing a broader perspective helps make the connections we build precious, and create value in our human existence.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of sculpture and watercolor from the estate of Lee Kelly. The gallery is proud to have shown sculpture, painting and works on paper by Lee Kelly since 1986. The Bennington Suite & Color Studies includes a selection of work which has never before been exhibited and spans across the artist’s impressive career, ranging from 1990 to 2020. The Bennington Suite watercolors central to this exhibition were created during a reflective period in 1998 when the artist spent time at Bennington College, Vermont. The works include geometric layering and references to Mayan architecture. These pieces exhibit a unique combination of Kelly’s expressive brushwork combined with structural forms in the same composition. The sculpture included in the show focuses on painting as well, featuring Kelly’s use of bright colors on a selection of maquettes, wall sculpture and large scale sculpture. In displaying his watercolors and sculptures simultaneously, the stylistic parallels between mediums are immediately evident. The painted sculptures display similar color palettes, brushstrokes and shapes, some even appearing as if fully realized versions of forms explored in the Bennington Suite. These two aspects of Kelly’s work brought together, examine his distinctive exploration of painting in both 2D and 3D mediums. This show is a celebration of color and of the balance between the architectural and the gestural which Kelly mastered over the course of his life.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to announce its first solo exhibition with Chris Chandler entitled Elemental Forms. Chandler’s geometric, monotype relief prints feature bold Bauhaus style compositions combined with experimental layering. Utilizing a rare Vandercook proofing press, Chandler investigates shape and color in his work, often layering both image and process for a balance between formalism and improvisation. Chandler transposes letters, words, and shapes into abstracted assemblies of laminated prints. His practice of rearranging, layering and tearing his prints reflects his appeal to the analog and endless combinations possible through the printmaking processes. Chandler’s print works communicate an admiration for the Bauhaus and Constructivist movements with nods to the origins of graphic design and typography. Chandler has become intimately familiar with typography and the historical process of creating letter and font styles. Utilizing this printing technique to spell out a song title or word he then fractures the font pieces into geometric shapes, reconfiguring them to create a graphic effect. Chandler also uses geometric forms to communicate music and sound elements such as drum beats, musical fades and more. These pieces may focus on a single sound or capture an entire song within one composition. Throughout all the work for Elemental Forms, Chandler’s methodology is driven by a delicate layering process of give and take, of knowing when to forge ahead and when to pause, of finding the balance in each piece. Often large in scale the works display qualities of immersion, movement and sound, harkening back to his 30 year career of tour management and sound engineering. Chris Chandler is a self-taught artist who fell into a passion for printmaking after acquiring his first Vandercook Press in 1996 and has exhibited his works across the Pacific Northwest and nationally, in New York City, Los Angeles and Oklahoma. In 2021 he was the recipient for both the Mohawk Paper’s Maker’s Grant and Stumptown Coffee’s Artist Fellowship. He lives and works in Portland, OR managing his art studio and Neu Haus Press for collaborations and letterpress workshops.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present a collection of work from the estate of Deborah Horrell. This is the second time the gallery has exhibited her work since her death in 2018. This show, Vessels + Forms revisits her stunning glass work. This exhibition showcases a range of the glass forms which Horrell honed and perfected over the years. Horrell explored the vessel form in a variety of ways, creating individual portraits and capturing human traits and personality in glass, mastering the pate de verre technique to create work which could seem unwaveringly sturdy and extremely delicate. Horrell’s practice with these works always focused on finding “the resonance”, the sound and shape and feeling that a piece is just right. Resonance was never synonymous with perfection for Horrell, she often embraced imperfections, encouraging them and the unique elements of each individual piece. These works are also about balance, about the pleasure of form and the elegant charm of handcrafted glass. Deborah Horrell (1953-2018) received her MFA from the University of Washington and her BFA from Arizona State University. After working as a ceramist for many years, Horrell participated in the Pilchuck Glass School's visiting artist program in 1994. A residency at the Bullseye Factory followed in 1996, permanently changing the trajectory of her career. Her work has been shown, in museums and galleries throughout the country, including the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.), Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH), the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (Louisville, KY), Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), Museum of American Glass (Wheaton Village, NJ) and the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR). Her work is included in many prominent public and private collections including the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), the Microsoft Art Collection (Seattle, WA), the Jordan Schnitzer Collection (Portland, OR), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH) and the Tucson Art Museum (Tucson, AZ). Deborah Horrell has been represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery since 2001.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Malia Jensen’s exhibition Look Out. Jensen populates the space with her imaginative sculpture and ceramic work, locating her signature dark humor and material beauty in subjects ranging from trophy-mounted seals sporting clown ruffs to carefully crafted clay traffic cones and a bronze woodpecker hard at work.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is delighted to welcome back Stephen Hayes for his 21st solo show. This exhibition, a democracy of images, pushes the boundaries of his impressionistic landscapes, utilizing color and dynamic brushwork to create enthralling compositions. Hayes is unafraid to deliver the unexpected throughout the peaceful compositions of this show. A hazy blue sky may be interrupted by a brash sweep of red, or an expanse of green field peppered with bright blue drip lines. His improvisational brush work skillfully guides the viewer’s eye, leading them through the landscapes with diligent attention to which details require a visual break or fresh pop of color. The collective title for this body of work, a democracy of images is an allusion to our relative willingness to believe what we see, in the face of what we know. We see the beauty of ‘place’ and find ourselves able or unable to reconcile the truth of current events as they relate to that beauty. Over the last several years, Hayes has used Google Earth images as inspiration and source material for his paintings. Hayes continues this practice in his new series, however the paintings that depict images of Ukraine and Kenya are a response to outdated images of those countries found online. Some of the ‘current’ resource photos available are from as long ago as 2003 and clearly do not illustrate today’s conflicts. As a result, they ask us to reconcile the contradiction between belief and truth. The images from around this country do the same. In the U.S. we are faced with the need to reconcile ongoing inequities predicated on hierarchies of class, race, gender, with a history of violent genocide against Indigenous peoples. The land is beautiful and full of poetry, and in this country all of it has been stolen from an Indigenous populace. The question remains: should one focus on the solace of beauty? Is the magical illusion of Google Earth a benefit or a distraction for us as we seek to reconcile this truth? Is the premise of ‘democracy’ an equivalent act of artful deception that we are constantly asked to address? Hayes expresses a staggering dichotomy with these tranquil landscapes while deftly illustrating his skill as a painter in capturing their natural beauty. Stephen Hayes has shown his work locally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), Northwest Museum of Art and Culture (Spokane, WA), American Culture Center (Sapporo and Nagoya, Japan), and The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). He has had several commissions for public art projects in the region, and his works can be found in the collections of Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR), New York Public Library (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), and Randall Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel (Portland, OR), as well as numerous private and public collections. In 2013 Hayes was the subject of a 30 year career retrospective at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR), which included a fully illustrated catalogue. In recognition of his accomplished career and dedicated studio art practice, Hayes was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present The Teckivy Nazdack, a new exhibition of paintings by Shane McAdams. These new dreamlike landscapes from McAdams are driven by an exploration of space, atmosphere and color. His work pushes the boundaries of what a landscape entails, carefully exploring perspective and sense of place. With innovative technique and skill, McAdams handles a range of materials from oil paints and acrylic to glue and enamel. His landscapes pull viewers into a strange new world, one almost familiar and yet oozing with strange distortion, creating a desire to look closer, lean in a little further. As technology and AI continues to tighten its grip on the art world, McAdams strives to create work with a dimensionality and nuance only achieved in the grit of reality. His show title The Teckivy Nazdack gives nod to the common phrase “the tech heavy nasdaq'' which NPR uses as they report stock market results at the end of the day. Such a phrase is one example of how media representation and constant repetition begins to flatten meaning and reaction. The presence that these visceral paintings exude is accomplished through explorations of texture, atmosphere and spatial relationships, creating work which begs to be examined closely and with the naked eyes of our physical world. Shane McAdams’ artworks masterfully combine divergent styles to create scenes where illusionistic space intersects with sublime landscapes. McAdams received his MFA from the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) in 2004, and his work has been exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery (New York, NY), Pace Wildenstein Gallery (New York, NY) and Caren Golden Fine Art (New York, NY). He has been a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail since 2003.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present two new captivating solo exhibitions from artists Sean Healy and Shane McAdams. Opening October 5, both shows will run through October 28, 2023. In an intimate new collection of work, Sean Healy’s show Lifer continues the artist’s internal battle between ego and self doubt. Populated primarily by a series of graphite drawings, the pieces in this show are a lifeline back to the artist’s first love of drawing. The obsessive mark making in many of these works on paper along with the personal subject matter bring a new level of clarity to Healy’s work. Stripping away pretense, this stylistic shift reflects a change in the artist’s thought process, creating a more personal level of expression. This beautifully raw collection of work includes subject matter such as portraits of his newly found birth father (Zeus) or of his aging Mother (Godmother). In his skillfully emotive portraits of animals, Healy comments on consumerism, politics and the self, choosing to capture his first self portrait in Self Portrait as Dionysus, a depiction of himself as a chimpanzee. Perhaps one of his most personal works is sculptural, Baby’s Teeth displays a collection of his wife’s baby and wisdom teeth in a clinically straight line from 6” standoffs. The resulting work creates a tension between sexuality and codependency that ultimately serves to make the viewer uncomfortably aware of piercing a couples’ personal bubble. With this show Healy reminds us with sharp intensity of the pitfalls and triumphs of one life and our shared humanity. In addition to exhibitions at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Healy has exhibited at the Betty Moody Gallery (Houston, TX), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass, CO), East/West Project, Dam, Stuhltrager/Gallery Homeland (Berlin, Germany) and The Art Gym (Marylhurst, OR). He has received several important public commissions, including the Wayne L. Morse Courthouse (Eugene, OR), Pioneer Place (Portland, OR), the General Services Administration Headquarters (Eugene, OR) and the FBI Headquarters (Houston, TX). The Elizabeth Leach Gallery has represented Healy since 1999, and in 2006 published a comprehensive catalogue on his work featuring an essay by Stephanie Snyder, director and curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College (Portland, OR).

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Contours of Instinct and Nuance, new paintings by the nationally acclaimed Willy Heeks. This body of work features new variations on the colorful and expressive painting Heeks is known for. After taking a pause from painting throughout the pandemic, Heeks has returned to the canvas with a fresh vulnerability permeating his work. The visual complexities of these pieces allude to the intrinsically cerebral framework from which the paintings were born and reflect the emotional release encouraged by his improvisational freedom. Heeks’ sweeping brushwork and graffiti-like approach is still very present, while many of the paintings are balanced with fractal details and sharp lines. The harmony of the work remains intact while these intriguing new additions push the boundaries of Heeks’ methodology. The new geometrical elements serve as the artist’s latest tool by which to explore the canvas, an excitingly fresh extension of Heeks’ ability to draw viewers in with his atmospheric composition and fierce complexity.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Ididom, new paintings by Pat Boas. The paintings in Idiom push the boundaries of Boas’ abstract style. Drawing from observation and memory, Boas populates her work with a multitude of shapes, some harkening back to letter forms, others derived from fragments of objects and spatial relationships she notices throughout the day. Much of Boas’ past work has been built around the written word, with letter forms often used as the basis for her layered, abstract paintings. This exhibition offers a departure from the word-asimage style which drove her earlier approach. In these new heavily layered paintings, Boas seeks to make meaning from sequences of formal decisions rooted in — but lying beyond — language. Certain pieces are akin to cubist still-life while others use moments of geometry to anchor a more atmospheric surface. Through improvisation and material exploration, Boas builds on the memory of familiar forms which then find their way onto her canvas. In this way, the show’s title of “idiom” finds its footing; each piece is made up of many unassuming fragments brought together, deriving new purpose from their relationship and proximity to one another. Pat Boas’ paintings, drawings and digital projects often use the form and sound-send of words as maps for abstraction. Elizabeth Leach Gallery has been exhibiting Pat Boas' work since 2010 and has represented her since 2015. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon Contemporary, PDX Contemporary and the Art Gym, in Portland, Oregon. Nationally her work has been exhibited at the Hallie Ford Museum (Salem, OR), the Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe, NM), the Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), the Sun Valley Museum of Art (Ketchum, ID), the Salt Lake Art Center (Salt Lake, UT), the Nicolaysen Museum (Casper, WY), the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH). She is a 2017 Hallie Ford Visual Arts Fellow. Select honors, fellowships, grants and residencies include the Bonnie Bronson Fund, the Corporation of Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Portland Art Museum, and Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council. Reviews of Boas’ work have appeared in Art in America and Art Papers. She is a professor emerita in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Peter Gronquist: Manifest, featuring new large-scale sculptural paintings and an interactive sculptural installation. The show highlights Gronquist’s interest in excavating personal history through manipulation and exploration of unconventional and found materials. In this inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Gronquist presents two different avenues of material investigation. The first, the mammoth installation Missoula Floods (2023), is an automaton for making line drawings on sheet metal. In this artwork, a group of boulders connected by chains to a small motor suspended from iron beams is dragged across painted sheets of metal, resulting in rough-hewn, scraped lines etched into the surface. Though constructed from heavy machinery and materials, Gronquist inflects his artwork with a personal poetic: the boulders are sourced from the Columbia River, the artist’s childhood stomping ground. The bulk of the works on view push the bounds of what can be called a painting - dynamic, wallmounted abstract sculptural assemblages. In these works, the artist manipulates a wide range of materials: polyurethane molded to resemble bone fragments, dyed wasp paper, wool, lace and other textiles, rose quartz, ash, metal, and what are essentially fossilized event posters, painstakingly chiseled from area telephone poles. On all these surfaces the artist applies paint in a soft palette of white, pale blue, blush and orange. The resulting all-over compositions, with jutting shards at odd angles in dreamy-hued colors, are simultaneously evocative of a big bang moment of creation, and a post-apocalyptic moment of destruction. In this liminal space, the artist’s own referents—small doodle-like drawings with personal significance scattered throughout each painting—are glimmers of stardust in the aftermath. Peter Gronquist is a multi-disciplinary artist working in diverse mediums and materials ranging from video and painting to sculpture and site-specific installations in our natural and built environment. Based in Portland, Oregon, Gronquist draws inspiration from the pastoral sensibility and rural backdrop of the Pacific Northwest to create work inflected by a sense of rough poetry and impermanence. Gronquist has exhibited in galleries and fairs across the globe, most recently at Hashimoto Contemporary, Winston Wachter, Primary projects, and bitforms gallery.

The gallery is pleased to present Wanted: Ed Bereal for “Still Disturbing the Peace”, featuring new sculptural installations. The exhibition continues Bereal's many year examination of socio-political themes of racial inequity and corruption in the United States, but with a new material exploration using innovative technologies. Known for his gestural drawings and meticulously crafted oil paintings and assemblage sculptures, for this exhibition, Bereal has created vertically suspended large-scale three dimensional artworks which the artist terms topographical drawings. These are the first works of their kind by Bereal and present a significant new direction in his practice with their embrace of new technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing to further explore more traditional methods of mark-making like sculpting and drawing. Each artwork is a kind of rendering etched into the substrate of clear nylon exposing the contours of a figure that appears to be entangled by, or fighting to emerge from, clear acrylic bars which resemble the stripes of the American flag. When lit, the shapes and lines of the artist’s drawing ethereally appear to float in midair, revealing Bereal’s political aims: pointing to the illusory promises of the flag, and the implicit contradictions of what, and for whom, it stands. The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to announce our participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2023. The gallery will feature a solo exhibition of historic works by Ed Bereal including drawing, photography, and video. Ed Bereal: Disturbing the Peace will be on view in the art fair’s Survey Sector December 6 – 10, 2023. Ed Bereal attended Chouinard Art Institute from 1959-1962 and later taught at University of California, Irvine and Western Washington University. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); The Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C.); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX); and The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn NY) among others. Recent exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France) in 2006 and Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden) in 2009; L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, Tilton Gallery (New York, NY) in 2006; as well as participating in Pacific Standard Time at The Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA) in 2011. His first museum retrospective, Wanted: Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace at the Whatcom Museum of Art (Bellingham, WA) in 2019 and Bereal’s recent APEX installation at The Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) was on view February 23, 2020 through June 27, 2021.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is proud to present Grief is on my calendar every day at 2:00 p.m., a solo exhibition of works by Derek Franklin. The exhibition opens on June 8 and runs through July 29, 2023. Any exhibition space is a stage of sorts on which objects are arranged and lit in a specific manner that supports and structures the player’s movements to produce effect. On the stage of the commercial gallery, experience happens, knowledge is produced, commerce is transacted. Derek Franklin uses the figure of the stage as a way to think about the historical material conditions that structure everyday life, imagining everyperson as a player with a role into which they are born and whose actions are constrained by the script. He produces paintings and sculptures that depict or evoke the actions performed on the most quotidian stage, that of the household, actions that moment by moment move the plot forward. In the theater of the everyday, another word for this plot movement is survival. What does one do to cope with violence that is both overt and invisibly woven into the structures of society? Franklin focuses on specific actions: the daily rituals of care that may include food and drink or the arrangement of flowers plucked from the garden. In Franklin’s layered paintings, the aperture of the spotlight framing the vase or plate punctures the surface of both painting and the remains of the performance it depicts, revealing it as performance. But the images simultaneously reflect Franklin’s respect and affection for the objects that he sees as being imbued with the stories of the people who live with them. He sees these not as interchangeable props, but specific objects that bear witness to the lives of their owners. The forms of Franklin’s sculptures evoke both prop and player: distorted wooden coatrack and stick-figure human. They support hints of odd and barely recognizable detritus of the everyday. And they formally insist that perceptions of their precarity are overstated, mightily grounded as they are, supported by concrete cast forms. In these objects and images, what may pass for reality is estranged and mediated, revealing it as a social construct. Herein lies their power.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery presents Killer Maker, a conversation with art objects between Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Justine Kurland. Killer maker. The two words taken together can suggest many things: the harsh reality of life’s cycle, a cosmic balancing act, an impossible binary that circles back in on itself. The simultaneously adversarial and harmonious nature is where Hutchins’ assemblages of ceramics, furniture, papier-mâché, and paint and Kurland’s photographs staged in the American West converge. Both artists refuse motherhood’s embrace (Hutchins has described it as “un-knowing” and Kurland as “abdication”): of authority, of resolution, of fixity. Hutchins’ small gouaches, explorations of the shape of color, show figures enmeshed in the landscape, undulations of pigment that recline on, drape from, and melt into their surroundings. Her polyvalent assemblages of paint, ceramic, and papier-mâché—accumulated onto paper or combined with upholstered and wooden furniture—are scrappy, raw, and sensuous in their intuited handmade construction. They resist an all-over, cohesive understanding, instead offering discordant unions that mine the meaning in the objects we live with. In one sculpture an armchair becomes a body, its soft flesh taking shelter under a papier-mâché shell, itself topped with a splayed-open peel of ceramic. In the wall reliefs organic but amorphous forms resonate with the pregnant and recently pregnant bodies in Kurland’s photographs. In a direct quote of the work and a nod to their two-decade friendship, Hutchins lovingly collages fragments of Kurland’s photographs into the pulped paper growths. In Kurland’s photographic series Of Woman Born (2004–2007), groups of nude women, pregnant and with young children, dot the vast landscape—they appear nestled in a towering rock formation, bathing at the base of a waterfall, or converging in a clearing in the woods, dappled with sunlight. The title Of Woman Born is borrowed from Adrienne Rich’s 1976 feminist text and aligns Kurland with Rich’s mission to untangle the construct of motherhood. Nearly twenty years after they were made, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade’s protections casts the questions posed by these photographs into sharper light. Without reproductive freedom, is there any such thing as motherhood? Would we still be raping, pillaging, and extracting natural resources if we considered the earth a father instead of a mother? Or would the earth be revered the way the heavenly father is?

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Mark R. Smith’s Stress Formations featuring new textile paintings and laser engravings that expand on the artist’s interest in social networks and structures, and the physical organization of crowds.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Cambodia Reamker by Dinh Q. Lê featuring new photographic weavings depicting the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Ramayana, interwoven with portraits of prisoners from the Khmer Rouge’s notorious prison, Tuol Sleng.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition by Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) which features recent paintings, sculpture, and installation. Titled looking for the land///found the weather, the exhibition is on view through February 25, 2023 with a First Thursday reception on January 5, 2023 and February 2, 2023. Sara Siestreem is a multidisciplinary artist who combines painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, and large-scale installation. Siestreem’s work includes social practice relating to institutional reform, community engagement and curatorial and educational practices surrounding Indigenous fine art.  In the first gallery a painting installation titled medicine fills the space and features vibrantly colored multi-panel paintings on wood and on paper. Coupled with the paintings is an installation titled research. This is comprised of natural material woven baskets, 3D printed baskets, and slip cast ceramic baskets. She shared these as wayfinding objects, markers into and out of the spatial constellation.   In the second gallery, a multimedia installation titled ceremony includes sculpture, and paintings that interweave our collective reality of the present, coexisting with the past. Individual artworks communicate broader narratives through a kind of visual symbiosis. Bundles of suspended sweetgrass braids titled babies breath are situated next to the painted diptych, grannies, set in conversation to the sculptural work, minion: four-legged spider. In the large-scale painting summertime, dynamic black and white geometric shapes of triangles and rectangles combine with the expressionistic immediacy of graphite lines and drippy, gestural red and yellow paints alongside photographic xeroxed imagery of objects and the artist’s hands. The work resonates with an expansiveness that energetically extends beyond the edges of the massive, seven-foot-tall artwork. The intimate space heightens the immersive experience as the carefully considered arrangements hint at bodily entities as a confrontation of erasure and invisible, violent histories.  With titles that entangle the contemporary and the ancient, her works combine allusion and metaphor and are exemplified in her recent titles including sun-flare, moonbeams, fastened to the rock (blood, sweat, and tears), tea with Kathleen, about a dead queen, lovers land mass (sea fret), black holes in the news (hot air), the us postal service wins seven times, here my dear (made in quarantine, to save your life), blue on the inside, lilac, and blue butterflies. The titles intrigue, invite, and simultaneously safeguard their own stories; an act of love, refusal, and resistance.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the twenty-fifth edition of Paris Photo. The fair will be held at the Grand Palais Éphémère located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. Our Booth (B-27) will feature photographs by national and international artists including Dinh Q. Lê, Justine Kurland, and Robert Lyons. Additionally, we will have select works available by Malia Jensen. The fair presents up to 200 exhibitors from across the world, offering collectors, curators, and enthusiasts the most diverse and qualitative presentation of photography-driven projects today.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Ann Hamilton. Featuring unique paper and cloth prints and collages, this new work is conceived in conjunction with the upcoming release of Hamilton’s publication with Radius Books and shares its title: Sense.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present a new series of figurative paintings by Jeremy Okai Davis. In his exhibition titled, A Good Sport, Davis focuses on Black Americans in the fields of sports and academia who navigated complex ideologies of “sportsmanship” throughout their professional careers.
 Several paintings are the largest Davis has ever created for an exhibition and include incredibly expressive, layered brushstrokes that invite the viewer to focus on every detail of the portrait. Ranging from the unrecognized heroes of professional baseball and basketball players to Kentucky Derby jockeys and college athletes, the artist’s subjects possess an exalted, emotional depth that transmits beyond the painted surface. In this new body of work Davis’s thoughtful and generous considerations of representation, technique, form and color simultaneously highlight his muses and allow them to embody their own stories.

Matthew Picton’s latest three-dimensional paper sculptures feature historical, religious, and spiritual symbology intertwined with newspaper headlines of current world events. The artist’s new works combine the ancient with the contemporary through meticulous layers of text and imagery that creates intriguingly evocative visual narratives.   Picton’s elaborate cut-out designs, constructed from newspaper headlines and texts, are disarmingly gorgeous and intended to disrupt preconceived notions of a singular worldview. The exhibit includes the artist’s dynamic large scale color sculptural works along with medium-sized artworks, elegantly executed in a softened black and white newspaper print palette.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present a multimedia exhibition by New York artist Nicola López. The show features several bodies of work including a series of graphite drawings, wall-sized works on paper, cyanotypes, and an immersive 4-channel video room installation.

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Yucatán Revisited, a memorial exhibition of recent sculptures and works on paper by renowned artist Lee Kelly (1932 - 2022). Kelly was a major figure in the Pacific Northwest and beyond for more than six decades. He is best known for monumental sculptures featured in public and private collections throughout the country. The exhibition reflects the influence of Kelly's travels and focuses on modernist works made during the last year of the artist’s life in 2021 and 2022. The show features his dynamic Cor-Ten steel sculptures, along with intimately sized cast bronze forms and works on paper that evoke imagery inspired by the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico where he visited, hiked and climbed throughout his life.

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. 

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.

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.

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).