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The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is pleased to present the show Silver Linings at NE 48th Ave featuring the work by Kate Copeland and Ayumi Ishii, from October 17 - November 6, 2024. 

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Kate Copeland uses printmaking and alternative photo processes to ossify light and time into tangible artifacts, translating experiences across registers, languages, systems, and space.  As part of this, Copeland  employs a limited lexicon that playfully eludes the clarity of the written word through durational deterioration. The translucency and frailty of paper become a second skin: a new beginning, a discarded remnant, a living and breathing container for the stories inside.   text  /  texture  /  textiles  /  textum.

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Copeland is an artist, educator, and administrator at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.  She has taught printmaking, alternative photographic processes, and two-dimensional media for over twenty years at various colleges and non-profit organizations including PCC, PSU, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and Minnesota Center for Book Arts.  She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she also serves as Senior Associate Dean.  Copeland has received two Fulbright Scholar Awards, the first in 2013 to teach alternative photo processes at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Gujarat, India, and the second in 2022 to conduct research at the Royal Academy of Art Antwerp and do an artist residency at Industriemuseum in Belgium.  Copeland holds an MFA from RISD (Printmaking ‘06) and a BA from Macalester College.

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Ayumi Ishii finds our inherent attraction to the shifting human body and memory both uneasy and fascinating. Her practice is a reaction to this strong sentiment, an attempt to record ephemeral human presence reinterpreted in a playful, subtle approach. Traces of existence may be of fragmented skin, body temperature, and breath that are captured in both traditional and experimental methods within self-imposed constraints.  Ishii’s interest lies in the interconnectedness and cyclical nature that weave us all together, intentionally or unintentionally, and there is a sense of surprise and comfort in knowing that. Phenomena found in water cycles and mediums such as cyanotype and thermal color enable Ishii to translate information like body water and heat into tactile visualizations. The result is a conundrum of wanting to create static, physical objects about fleeting human essence.

 

Ayumi Ishii is a Japanese artist based in Rhode Island. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Sculpture from Purchase College, SUNY. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including Kunst Haus Wien (Austria), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), Nizayama Forest Art Museum (Japan), Glass Pyramid Gallery (Japan), and a permanent outdoor sculpture at Stevens Point Sculpture Park (WI). She has recently taught a sculpture workshop at the University of Jan Evangelista in Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic. She is a two-time recipient of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation Grant and has been awarded residencies including Sculpture Space, Vermont Studio Center, and Wassaic Project.

 

Statement on collaborative work

As a collaborative bi-coastal team, Copeland and Ishii share ideas, techniques, and pieces of their lives, and they create artwork separately and together. This process augments their individual explorations and allows them to enter a collective space of discovery and evolution. By flattening objects into cyanotypes or rendering images into solid castings,  Copeland and Ishii explore time-based dimensionality. Sharing pieces of their lives with each other has also heightened their awareness about ephemerality. They work to evolve their own practices that were previously unexplored, they challenge each other creatively, and they develop strategies to live their lives in a way that is holistically committed to creative practice.  What does it mean to be an artist, parent, and creative person in this rapidly changing world?  How can their shared focus on underlying systems and patterns work to shape their trajectories?  Together, Copeland and Ishii work to share, reflect, learn, and create something new.

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