Elizabeth Leach Gallery

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. 

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.

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.

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).