Gallery Hours: 12-5 pm, Saturday & Sunday

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 6, from 5-8 pm

Artist Talk: Saturday, January 27, 1 PM

The awe. The mundane. The tedium. The heartache. The loneliness. The stamina. The yearning. The complexity of loving and wanting to feel loved in return. From poetry to photography, language to line, sculpture to screen printing or ceramics to collage, Elizabeth Arzani and Renee Couture each draw from their experiences embedded in repetitive patterns and routines of their respective every day.

For Arzani, mining an archive of daily writing and collecting results in a series of erasure poems; a selection of words revealed against redacted sentences, simultaneously adding and subtracting. Words from the past shape-shift in the present, appearing in iterations and echoes—(w)holes— undulating between legible and illegible. Meanwhile, Couture pulls from the many (small big) moments of motherhood - romantic imagery and contradicting reality. Where time is held together by bursts of flimsy starts and abrupt stops. Days swallowed whole, filled with lines that have neither a beginning nor an end—leaving only a brief space in-between, a hole to pause and hear the sound of a deep breath: inhale, exhale. Repeat. ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Elizabeth Arzani is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Portland, Oregon. As a collector of sorts, her work is rooted in storytelling, offering a form of communication that extends language. Arzani has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently in Perth, Western Australia. She has collaborated on public art installations with Shunpike’s Storefronts Project in Seattle and has participated in an artist residency with Kulturschapp in Walferdange, Luxembourg. Her most recent artist residency was with New Harmony Clay Project in Indiana. Arzani holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. elizabetharzani@gmail.com | @elarzani

Since becoming a mother four years ago, Renee Couture has made work addressing her relationship with motherhood through a diverse practice, encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and three Career Opportunity Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, and four Project Grants from the Douglas County Cultural Coalition. Couture has been granted residencies at Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, Jentel, PLAYA, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Pine Meadow Ranch, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently, Couture lives on seven acres in rural southern Oregon with her husband, toddler daughter, and two dogs. She works out of a retrofitted 20-foot camper-turned studio space located in her garden.