Elizabeth Leach Gallery

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to announce Of ev ryh re and n wh re, the gallery’s first solo presentation of works by Vo Vo. Vo creates sculptures and textile-based works that reflect on the dehumanizing internationalism of a globalized economy, climate change, media streams, social forces, geographic displacement, erasure and the ongoing genocide of a people The exhibition title, Of ev ryh re and n wh re, is drawn from a quote about adult ‘third culture kids,’ for whom home is “everywhere and nowhere”. Reflecting on their own identity, experience and history as an immigrant, third culture kid, and child of refugees from the Vietnam War, Vo’s installation draws attention to feelings of displacement and the inability to find a place to settle in the world. The exhibition contemplates the possible futures of people who lose their homes, their lands, associated nation-states, or are displaced from the localities where they and their families are from. Allusions to marginalized bodies, the policing of movement, and imperial and colonial forces, even evident online, are found throughout the exhibition. In Vo’s weavings, the pendulum of a two-party political system swings back and forth; hands enter and emerge from screens; the artist, represented as a horse, navigates a city. Bisecting the gallery, a bench with elements of hostile architecture rises from the floor, its structure both impeding and directing the movement of viewers. Against these forces, opportunities for community-building and healing emerge – a bed for rest and a table where we can gather appear; a figure steps through a door; the end of the bench offers a poem and a place to sit in contemplation. Creating the opportunity to explore different zones of safety, Vo invites viewers to come together and navigate the current political climate. Vo Vo (they/them) explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities. They are editor, educator, curator, artist, and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Singapore, Croatia, Mexico, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden, Malaysia, and the States. In their transdisciplinary art, they work in textiles, embroidery, audio, video, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy and colonization.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Backstage, an exhibition of photographs by Christopher Rauschenberg. Drawn from Studio Photography, Rauschenberg’s longest-running series, Backstage gives viewers a glimpse into an essential aspect of the art ecosystem, the artist’s studio. As the child of artists and a curator himself, Rauschenberg has frequented studios for his entire life, and thus is particularly well-situated to draw the curtain aside for his audience. Born of a feeling that the public isn’t shown behind the scenes often enough, these works invite viewers into the studios of Portland-based artists, as well as that of Rauschenberg’s mother, Susan Weil. Through individual images and combinations that create fictional spaces, Rauschenberg sets the stage to allow for discovery of these places of creation. With his deep involvement in Portland, Oregon’s art scene, Rauschenberg extends a welcome, allowing us to look over his shoulder and engage with the artists around us. Artists whose studios are featured in Backstage include Katherine Ace, Ebenezer Galluzzo, Malia Jensen, Joanne Radmilovich Kollman, Henk Pander, Laura Ross Paul, Marie Watt, and Susan Weil. Based in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Rauschenberg received his BA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. His work has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), the Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), the International Center of Photography (New York, NY) and the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), among many other major institutions. An exceptionally active leader in the Northwest arts community, Rauschenberg co-founded both Nine Gallery and the photography nonprofit Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, Oregon).

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Exotic Animal, an exhibition of new paintings by Jinie Park. In Exotic Animal, Park explores contrast, surface, and space, incorporating textiles, planned but uncontrollable fields of color, and cutouts to create paintings that are at once familiar and novel. Park emphasizes the exotic elements of her previous paintings in these new works through the exaggeration of contrast between painted and unpainted areas, and the looseness and excessiveness of the materials, shapes, sizes and colors. With the paper-like surface of her canvases, Park sees the process of making her paintings as akin to drawing. The washes of paint leave stains and create tension on certain parts of the paintings, while the unpainted areas are loose. These paintings continue the material investigation of Park’s Windows series, which incorporated exposed stretcher bars and openings which expose the structural elements of the works. This sculptural aspect of Park’s work is inspired by her interest in “gaps” in architectural spaces, which can allow light or space to walk through; the gaps in these paintings accentuate or interrupt the seams of her sewn-together canvases and fields of color, inviting the viewer to investigate what lies beyond. Jinie Park creates ethereal works on canvas with thinly layered, translucent washes of paint. Through her abstraction she investigates and engages with the history and conventions of painting, applying paint on all sides of her canvas. Park received a BFA in painting at Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea) and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD). Her work has been shown at the Kimsechonng Museum (Seoul, South Korea), the Louisiana Biennial Juried Exhibition, School of Design at Louisiana Tech University (Ruston, LA) and in a juried exhibition at Weiser Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA). Park was awarded an Individual Artist Award in Painting from the Maryland State Art Council, the Henry Walters Traveling Fellowship and the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Scholarship from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2016 Park received the Perez Art Museum Miami Picks Award during PULSE Miami Beach. Elizabeth Leach Gallery published a catalogue of her work in 2018.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Scripts, an exhibition of new paintings by Pat Boas. In Scripts, Boas continues to investigate the forms of text and her interest in embodied language and gesture, creating paintings that attempt to capture the space that thought occupies. ”Script” can refer to a text or handwriting, to a plan of action or a sequence of commands; Boas’ Script paintings begin with a formal, language-based root and shift and develop over time, their original structures revealed and obscured by their evolution. Through a process of applying of multiple layers of paint, Boas creates meditative works whose images remain in flux, their compositions extending beyond the edge of the picture plane. Thinking of reading as a negotiation between positive and negative space, these works focus not on the formal structure of letters and phrases, but on the movements, marks, edges and interior spaces related to the presentation of language, and the mysterious, immaterial processes by which those marks become thought. Color is also an important element in Boas’ recent work. Starting the process of painting with clashing colors placed side-by-side, the artist then makes intuitive choices informed by her materials, opaque Flashe and thin acrylic glazes. In recent work, the artist has thought of colors in relation to seasons, and the dark, jewel-tones in the Script paintings are evocative of winter. Alongside the Script paintings, Boas is presenting paintings that go “off-script,” made with intuitive gestures that stray away from the more consciously directed Script paintings. Like seeds from a parent, these works draw their compositions from a “passage” of the Script paintings; Boas then continues to paint these works, exploring the impact of thought and “thoughtlessness” on their making. Pat Boas’ paintings mine the gap between body, space, language, and perception. Committed to abstraction, she is guided by a collage sensibility that brings together disparate orders and fragmented artifacts, and incorporates suggestions of figuration, competing spatial systems, and art historical references as they arise. 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, PDX Contemporary, the Art Gym and Oregon Contemporary (Portland, Oregon), the Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), the Hallie Ford Museum (Salem, OR), and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR). Nationally her work has been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe, NM), the Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), the Salt Lake Art Center (Salt Lake, UT), the Nicolaysen Museum (Casper, WY), the Whatcom Museum (Bellingham, WA), the Eiteljorg Museum (Indianapolis, IN), 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, Caldera Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, The Ford Family Foundation, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon College of Arts and Craft, 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.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995 - 2023, an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Dinh Q. Lê (1968 - 2024). This is the gallery’s first exhibition of Lê’s work since his untimely passing in April of 2024. Spanning the artist’s three-decade career, this exhibition brings together several bodies of his work and features photographs, photo-weavings, and sculpture made between 1995 and 2023. Elizabeth Leach Gallery first presented Lê’s work in 1998 and was an important platform for some of his most experimental exhibitions. At a remove from the critical audience of New York, these exhibitions were meditations on a life lived between East and West, Buddhism, war, and photography as a medium. With his singular voice and incisive vision, Lê developed an artistic practice concerned with the mutability and insolvability of self-identity, memory, and the historical record. This exhibition features several of Lê’s signature photo-weavings from multiple discrete bodies of work, including an example from his infamous From Vietnam to Hollywood series (2003 - 2005). These distinctive works are known for the juxtaposition of conflicting images and ideas, and are made with traditional Vietnamese mat weaving techniques that the artist learned as a child. Angkor temples are paired with interior views of Tuol Sleng (Monuments and Memorials, 2021), Khmer Rouge prisoners with murals from the Cambodian Royal Palace at Phnom Penh (Cambodia Reamker, 2023), and western product logos and Hollywood film stills with Buddhist and Communist symbols (From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage, 2007). Also featured are photographs and sculptures from a lesser-known body of work, Signs and Signals from the Periphery (2009). Responding to the challenging years of 2008 and 2009, this group of works demonstrates how people living on the margins in a rapidly changing Vietnam communicated and marked their place in the world. Bicycle tires, DVDs, and bricks with paper funnels signify the availability of bicycle repairs, pornography, and fuel. Over the course of Dinh Q. Lê’s career, his work was exhibited in numerous international biennials, triennials, and museums. Before the age of forty-five, Dinh’s work was featured at the Venice Biennale (2005), the Asia Society (2005; 2017; 2021), the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006), the Gwangju Biennale (2006), the Singapore Biennale (2006; 2008), the Vancouver Biennial (2009), the 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2009), the Museum of Modern Art (2010), the Busan Biennale (2010), the Kiev Biennial (2012), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), the Carnegie International (2013), the Mori Art Museum (2015; 2017), and the Musée du quai Branly (2020; 2022), among other major museum exhibitions. Dinh's work is included in the collections of the Tate Modern, the Mori Museum, the Asia Society, the Carnegie Museum, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and numerous other museum and institutional collections. Elizabeth Leach Gallery is honored to have had the opportunity to work closely with Dinh Q. Lê and is proud to continue to support his legacy. Dinh Q. Lê (1968 - 2024) created conceptually based multimedia work that reflects on the complex history of Vietnam, issues of war, displaced populations and how non-western cultures are depicted in western media. Lê had a solo exhibition in 2022 at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, France, and in 2018 at the San Jose Museum of Art. In July of 2015, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum presented a retrospective of his work. Exhibiting internationally for 25 years, Lê’s work was shown in the 2013 Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, PA), dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, Germany), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), Kiev Biennial (Kiev, Ukraine), a Projects 93 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and a critically acclaimed one-person exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. Lê’s work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Ford Foundation (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia), Singapore Art Museum, and the Zabludowicz Collection (London, England).

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Derek Franklin, "Between the Time of the Dog and the Wolf," Franklin’s second exhibition with the gallery. In these paintings, Derek continues his exploration of light and dark, clear and obscure, and the way in which everyday objects become part of daily rituals in our lives. Drawing the exhibition’s title from the French concept of “entre chien et loup”, the darkest point of twilight when it difficult to see things as they truly are or discern what is real, "Between the Time of the Dog and the Wolf" asks viewers to slow down and truly see what lies at the heart of contemporary life. While humanity has experienced drastic changes over time, our three basic needs remain the same, and the items we use on a regular basis, beds, vessels, food, have become hallowed over time. These vernacular objects appear in Franklin’s paintings, and represent the everyday ceremonies of care that sustain us. Reacting to the “media deluge” and the fast-paced, endless “scroll” on the smartphones that have come to mediate our interactions with the world, Franklin is interested in the presentation of information and ideas. To him, painting is to cinema as poetry is to literature, the distillation of ideas into a more immediate, compact format. In a time when disassociation through media consumption is tempting, these works call for a return to a more sustainable, human pace of life, and invite extended participation with a single image or idea. Franklin’s background in sculpture and performance art is evident in these paintings. As with his previous exhibition, these new works feature “spotlights” which draw attention to the subject of each work, while obscuring other aspects. The starting point for each work is a collage which includes materials sourced from archaeology journals, food magazines, and the artist’s own images. Franklin cuts out parts of photographs from pages which are then laid over other images, creating unusually shaped apertures through which the background subject matter appears. This overlay recalls the screen in a theater, obscuring and also focusing the viewers’ attention. From this rigid starting point, he then makes fluid, formal, reactive decisions through the rest of the work. Formally, these new works represent an advancement in Franklin’s conception of space and scale as a painter. The amount of information contained in the largest works has been reduced, giving the spotlit objects more air, and the compositions become increasingly dense as the scale of the paintings diminishes. As such, the small paintings on cast concrete frames contain the most information, becoming devotional objects with an intimate presence that rewards closer viewing. Derek Franklin Constructing a World in A Predetermined State #6, 2024 oil on cast concrete 11.5 x 9.5 x 1.375"

Featuring ten artists, Everyday Alchemy brings together a selection of works that draw inspiration from things we interact with on a daily basis, whether that is evident in the content of the work or in the materials used to create it. Cardboard boxes, mud, and clothing, among other items, serve as the source material to which these artists apply their magic, transmuting the mundane into the extraordinary. This exhibition includes Malia Jensen’s surreal reimagining of a lightbulb, Bonnie Bronson’s masterful, minimal constructions that reveal themselves to be made of humble cardboard upon closer inspection, Isaac Layman’s perfectly composed portraits of an Amazon box or refrigerator, and Mark R. Smith’s assembly of vinyl and clothing, which draws its form from the original layout of the World Trade Center. Hunter Braithwaite (b. 1986) lives in New York. He received his MFA from New York University and his BA from the College of William and Mary. He has exhibited with Embajada in San Juan. A longtime arts writer and editor, he has curated numerous exhibitions, and has lectured at the School of Visual Arts and Sotheby's Institute of Art. Bonnie Bronson was born in Portland, Oregon in 1940 and attended the Portland Art Museum School (now PNCA, Pacific Northwest College of Art) from 1959-61. Bronson exhibited actively throughout the Northwest, including a one-person exhibition at the Portland Art Museum (1979) and several exhibitions at Marylhurst College in Marylhurst, Oregon. Bronson was commissioned for several permanent artworks at prominent businesses and institutions throughout Oregon, and received the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 1978. Following her death in 1990, the Bonnie Bronson Fund was created, awarding an annual prize to a regional artist since 1992. She was honored by a major retrospective at PNCA in 2011. Ann Hamilton is internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, collective voice, communities past and of labor present. 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. Malia Jensen lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues and institutions including the Melbourne International Arts Festival (Melbourne, Australia), Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (Milwaukee, WI), Holter Museum of Art (Helena, MT), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Mesa Arts Center (Mesa, AZ), Marian Goodman Gallery (London, England), Richard Gray Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Cristin Tierney Gallery (New York, NY). She has been an Artist in Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Captiva, FL), Ucross Foundation (Clearmont, WY), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and the Portland Garment Factory (Portland, OR); and a visiting artist and speaker at Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA), Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR), Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR), and Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston, MA). She has completed numerous public commissions in the Northwestern United States, and her work is held in many public and private collections. Jensen has been represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery since 2006. Isaac Layman is a photographer who consistently pushes the limits of how an image can be constructed while using his immediate domestic surroundings as subject matter. Layman has exhibited at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX) and Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL), among others. He was awarded the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum and the Contemporary Northwest Art Award from the Portland Art Museum. His work is in many collections including the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse (Miami, FL), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, MN). Don Nice grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, immersed in tales of outlaws and frontier life from his grandfather, a physician and gold miner. His childhood on the range instilled in him a deep connection to nature, which later influenced his art. Encouraged by his grandfather and aunt, both amateur painters, Nice pursued painting alongside athletics, earning a football scholarship to USC. After teaching art and serving in the U.S. Army, where he worked as an illustrator, he studied painting in Rome on the G.I. Bill. In Florence, he was profoundly influenced by Oskar Kokoschka, who taught him to truly "see" as an artist. Inspired by Abstract Expressionism after viewing The New American Paintings in Paris, he returned to the U.S., teaching in Minneapolis before enrolling at Yale’s graduate painting program in 1962. There, he studied among influential artists like Chuck Close and Nancy Graves, but it was Alex Katz’s emphasis on personal experience and subject matter that shaped his distinctive style, which continues to evolve today. Jess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, Canada, she is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Socrates Sculpture Park in NY, Cambridge Galleries in Canada, De Fabriek in The Netherlands, and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series. Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines, a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was primarily a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance. Rauschenberg received numerous awards during his nearly 60-year artistic career. Among the most prominent were the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death on May 12, 2008. Mark R. Smith’s current studio practice involves use of recycled textiles which he incorporates into labor-intensive, densely patterned motifs that reference communal architecture, crowd dynamics and the behavioral aspects of social organisms. His work has been featured in institutions across the US including the Portland Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, OH) and the Zimmerly Art Museum, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). His solo exhibitions include The Office of the Governor (Salem, OR), Gallery Hlemmur (Rykjavik, Iceland), The Art Gym Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR) and several at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, OR where his work is represented. Smith has also received many public commissions, including projects with Trimet, Providence Hospital and the Port of Portland (all Portland, OR). His work is included in several public and private collections, including the American Embassy (Accra, Ghana), CityArts Inc. (New York, NY), King County Public Art Collection, Meta (Seattle, WA), Lewis and Clark College (Portland, OR), and Nike Inc. (Beaverton, OR). Smith received his BFA from the Cooper Union (1983) and his MFA from Portland State University (1997). Donald Sultan is one of the leading American contemporary still life artists. He currently lives and works in New York. Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. The work of Donald Sultan is voluminous and varied. Since his first one-man show in 1977, he has enjoyed a distinguished career as painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His extensive body of work has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art, where he has become best known for his ability to successfully merge the best of yesterday's artistic tradition with a fresh, modern approach that is unique.

Judy Cooke’s exhibition, Following Form 2024, is the artist’s seventeenth solo show with Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Exploring the notion of what a painting can be remains a central concern for Cooke, and her insistence on drawing our attention to the sides of her panels makes us realize that the experience of a painting is far more than pictorial. Her work refers quite specifically to its surrounding architectural conditions and our physical relationship to them. Nods to the Russian Constructivist, Suprematist, and certain Post-Minimalist such as Imi Knoebel, Robert Mangold, and even Elizabeth Murray are hard to ignore. These influences flutter and echo amongst the work, but Cooke’s brand of Formalism is uniquely her own and has been for over five decades. Having come from a background of printmaking and graphic art, Cooke has been developing an abstract language that both expands and subverts the tenets of Minimalism in the most joyful of ways while simultaneously paying tribute to them. Unexpected shapes and materials such as rubber are again utilized and rhyme beautifully in their naked and contorted way when abutted against her signature, raw woodworks. Though her paintings can appear at times austere, they have a hidden humor and tenderness that’s unlocked when closely studied. Sculpted wooden panels with glyph-like markings playfully argue with the irregular shapes of their substrates. Color frequently somersaults into kaleidoscopic arrangements; sometimes, it remains stoic and straight. Cooke’s ability to choreograph a beautiful collision of painterly and sculptural gestures is the work of a mind that refuses to accept any one genre or tradition and prefers to find a more plural definition of how an artist manifests her practice while submitting fresh new ideas about abstraction. Judy Cooke has been exploring abstract imagery and the structure of painting for over 50 years. With a strong understanding of and connection to the genres of geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism, Cooke explores the space between paintings and sculpture, examining the physical nature of the work. Cooke majored in printmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her BFA at Tufts University (Medford, MA) and a MAT at Reed College (Portland, OR). She has exhibited extensively, including a retrospective at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR) and exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA). She has been the recipient of numerous prestigious grants, including the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Art (Pasadena, CA), Regional Arts & Culture Council Visual Artist Fellowship Grant (Portland, OR), Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting (Salem, OR) and the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship. Her work is included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), and Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), among many others.

This new exhibition of two- and three-dimensional works by Christine Bourdette marks her thirteenth solo exhibition with Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Although familiar, the information is new, continuing her fascination with geological forms and drawing inspiration from the landscape. Her enduring practice can be seen as its own kind of geology, if you define the scholarship as a careful study of how pressure and time manifest. The endurance test taken on by Bourdette is a testament to how success can be achieved through continuity and focus while up-cycling skillful gestures into unique symbols. Two new sculptural, wall-reliant works are comprised of hundreds of hand-cut pieces of layered vellum. Each individual element has been bathed in pigment-based ink and, when assembled, vaguely resembles core samples that have been contorted into beautiful, parabolic shapes. They are visual representatives of the notion that the earth is an unending cycle of restlessness and transformation and that erosion can create perfectly imperfect objects. A new series of experimental drawings and works on paper includes various printmaking techniques involving hand-hewn overlays such as cut-out veils and silver-leafed swaths of raised patterns that read like braille on Rorschach patterns. These works are paired with other water-based works on Dura-Lar, a non-absorptive substrate that creates a mysterious effect with her signature treatments. Bourdette’s images reference landscapes and speak to nature’s fragility with these frail materials, assiduous labor, and simple gestures. The compositional strategy of bisecting the picture plane with a horizontal void is a recurring motif in Bourdette’s new two-dimensional works and is meant to enunciate the disconnect between human beings and the planet we occupy. This symbolic incision is less about contention, human vs. nature, than an estrangement between us and our habitat. With an uneasy eye on the horizon, apprehension about climate change is an implicit theme in this exhibition, and Bourdette will quickly admit that her work is a subtle call to action—a quiet protest, as all great works of art in their own special way can be. The desire to transmit the sensation of being inside a landscape is also an ongoing aim of Bourdette’s work. Looking both down and up is important to the artist. There’s also the idea of pareidolia, the tendency to see meaningful images in random or ambiguous visual patterns. This notion is not lost on the artist, as cloud formations and rugged ridge-scapes exist formally on equal planes in her work. Those shapes are absorbed and reconfigured into abstract musings that reference the textural patterns of columnar basalt common to the Northwest, especially in the Columbia River Gorge and other places that have experienced volcanic activity. This exhibition is full of pieces teeming with sometimes incongruous colors that unexpectedly work; shocks of acerbic yellow and powdery pinks populate her compositions and easily tease out joy from the viewer. Bourdette’s work is ultimately an ode to how we perceive and remember the land while wishing for its permanence despite it shifting beneath our feet. Christine Bourdette is a visual artist whose practice includes sculptures, drawings, and installations. Her meticulously crafted artworks comment on social, political, or human predicaments through a three-dimensional vocabulary that incorporates a wide repertoire of materials. Bourdette received her BA from Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR) and has exhibited in the United States and France, including solo exhibitions at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), The Tyler Museum of Art (Tyler, TX), Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, WA), Klein Art Works (Chicago, IL), The Alexandria Museum, (Alexandria, LA), and Galerie L’Aire du Verseau (Paris, France). Her sculpture and drawings are in many public and private collections nationwide, and her art has been featured in Sculpture magazine and reviewed in Art in America, Artweek, and Visions Quarterly. She has been featured in three Oregon biennial exhibitions and has permanent public artworks in Portland, OR, Tempe, AZ, Seattle, WA, and many other locations. Bourdette was the first recipient of the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship Award in 1992.

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.

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).

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 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 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 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.