Artist Reception: Virtual First Thursday, March 4, 2021 @ 6pm on Facebook Live. We are also having a give away during the reception: you can win a print from Edie or a sketch from me! Like @blackfish_gallery, @kelseybirsa and @eoverturf on Instagram and comment during our FB Live.
Gallery Hours: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays 11 am - 4 pm
Kelsey Birsa’s paintings are united through her use of detailed rendering alongside abstract marks, bold colors, and gold highlights. Interested in traditional painting techniques and themes of the human body, she also likes to explore consciousness and the connection or disconnection that we feel with our physical selves.
In her current series, Birsa explores her experiences of quarantine and the feelings of anxiety and depression that it has created in herself and many others. She sourced images from her remote online community and included mixed media and abstraction in her process as a reflection of the recent chaos of current events. The past year has been a rollercoaster of emotions for many of us, ranging from frustration to compassion and confusion to hope, as we navigate a world of information overload. While we each experienced 2020 a little differently, Birsa’s latest series of paintings illustrate how we are together in our loneliness.
Kelsey Birsa is a painter living in Portland, Oregon and has a BFA in Art Practices from Portland State University. She is the recipient of awards such as Best in Show at the Society of Washington Artists, The Artist Magazine Student Portrait Competition, and first place at Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited locally at the Blackfish Gallery, Art at the CAVE, Gallery 360, North Bank Artist Gallery, and many more. She has been published in the Columbian, Beacon Magazine, Pathos, and The Artist Magazine.
Follow her on Instagram @kelseybirsa
www.kelseybirsa.com
Edie Overturf’s relief prints, drawings and sculptural work use the relationship of image and text to formulate narratives. Through indirect gesture and guiding vocabulary, the viewer is invited to weave their own connections. Much of the imagery and use of text were developed to give voice to her own frustrations and despair. Our world has held so much anger and so much fear, magnified under capitalism and today’s political oppression. The pandemic has highlighted unresolved discord and disparity in the foundations of American life. There’s no individual story that encapsulates the communal experience of pain, loss, anger and anxiety. There are moments of fatigue from fighting to merely exist, let alone, to thrive. Flashes of anger and resentment when seeing strangers’ unmasked faces. The loathsome ache of grief and loss that is universally understood, yet painfully isolating. Inequities, injustices, and tragedies that have existed among us for far too long being exposed. This collection of work is an attempt to put words to that heaviness, to connect with others across a great distance. Through a process of collecting, naming, and giving forms to these feelings, Overturf hopes to create a space for viewers to process, grieve, and untangle their emotions.
Edie Overturf currently lives in Portland and teaches printmaking and drawing at Mount Hood Community College. She has her BFA from Southern Illinois University, and her MFA from California State University, Chico. Overturf is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, and two Minnesota State Arts Board grants. She has attended several residencies, including those at Kala Art Institute, InCahoots, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and an upcoming Professional Development residency at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking. Edie Overturf has been a member of Blackfish Gallery since October 2019.
Backroom gallery
Kane Ikeda
Kane Ikeda has been creating sculptures and paintings that derive inspiration from a dream he had years ago where he was in the midst of cosmos and saw the universe as a constantly evolving tree-like form where stars appear as flowers and fruits of this Cosmic Tree. This time Ikeda has illustrated this dream as drawings using acrylic ink.