Frankie Krupa-Vahdani’s works offer a similar grandeur to Wojick’s, as her bold tapestry, “Big Blue Grief”, is composed of a kaleidoscopic array of distinct scraps of bandanas and hand-marbled textiles, comes together in the scale of an area rug. The aesthetics in her creative practice are influenced by multiple aspects of her family history, such as Wycinanki — the Polish craft of paper cutting — and classic Persian motifs. 

As a first-generation American and the child of immigrants from Iran and Poland, she grew up making sense of generational trauma and many inherited stories, some from the Holocaust and some from the chaos of pre-Iranian Revolution. She blends both of her family’s visual languages “into her own unique dialect filled with vitality and affection.” Her two small pieces included in the exhibition, “Subfloor + I found a walnut” and “Strawberries belong to themselves” transpose commonplace materials into heavily labored works, each somehow exhibiting an effervescent, almost childlike immediacy. 

Artspace is pleased to present Heather Watkins’ site-specific installation marked by swooping ink-soaked cotton cords suspended in a monumental arrangement. Watkins’ work explores the poetics between contradictory forces such as dark/light, recto/verso, constriction/release, and beyond. She is captivated by the changing body, both actual and metaphorical, and speaks about how her personal experience influences her work.

Sixteen years ago I was diagnosed with a brain tumor compressing my optic nerve. The process of treatment, recovery, and ongoing observation has made me acutely aware of the ways in which we feel and know time, and has given me a window into the nature of change and impermanence. This perspective has shaped my work, both conceptually and materially. There are many ways to deal with what we cannot control. My response has been to find a way of working that is attuned to experimentation and materiality.

The individual cords in her arrangement can be traced back to numerous past lifetimes of sculpture-making. This particular artwork is a reverent display of her drive towards reimagination. Her work is perhaps as much material as it is the embodied movement that dictates the installation of material. At the core of her work is the mutable, transcendent essence of things.

Firmly anchored on the floor is Francesca Capone’s massive spiral form with a title that spirals as well, “Scallop / Newly carved out recesses become vessels, in time you collect, and you build up once more”.  This sculpture’s form of the spiral expresses the moment at which a clash of opposites has been resolved, or is even transcended. Capone’s artistic ethos involves a loose interpretation of the traditional craft of weaving. Through her disciplined, technical training and well-educated approach to the practice, she challenges weaving to be not only a tedious process but a poetic act. The viewer is thus invited to co-create the narrative world of her work, to think beyond the expectations of the woven form, and further, to contemplate the representation of time and place. Her integration of unlikely, sometimes found materials which might otherwise be waste, in this case, dock lines from a nearby marina, likely along the Columbia River, builds complex meaning within her work. Spirals are one of the most widespread shapes found in the natural world, and offer a vast ocean of symbolic significance and cross-cultural primordial powers invoking concepts of inner consciousness, energy, and rebirth. The spiral itself may too represent dissolution or accumulation, both concepts at play in Capone’s material process. Here, also, the spiral is bound by a mesh-like grid of cotton,  polycord, and bookbinders tape, holding the charge of the idiom, “keeping it together”, in times of great fragmentation. 

Emily Katz shares with us a new larger-than-life freehand embroidery on tulle conveying a figure composed of many disparate selves. Each fragment of the figure floats above the next, with each layer isolated as if upon a diaphanous cloud yet intrinsically tied to the layers within. 

Her work here is an inquiry of self love, motherhood, evolving identity and a reintroduction to the wild and wonderful but often hidden and neglected parts of ourselves after childbirth and big life transitions. Her core questions include, 

Who am I now?

How do I best show up in the world? 

Can I welcome all of myself? 

How do I find contentment in the wildness of the outer world? 

Where is my anger welcomed?

Emily is a multi-hyphenate whirlwind of a creative worker, whose artistic practice spans a wide spectrum of disciplines– perhaps reflecting her earlier times in Waldorf schools. She is a searcher and her artwork reflects this impulse to dive into the underground, and to reside in the fertile and transformative darkness within oneself and the shared world. Though she may be best known as a luminary in the world of textile arts and entrepreneurship, she continues to delve into the unknown, evermore curious with each new project. 

Sally Jablonsky’s newest painting debuts here, entitled, “The Collectors, or, That Which is Sown is Passed On”, depicting a figure contorted upon a wrinkled sheet on the ground, harvesting seeds from a pine cone in a moment of quiet transformation. The work explores the deep reciprocity between the human and plant experience, situating this relationship within the broader context of agricultural industrialization and its possible effects on care and connection to the land. For Jablonsky, colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism—along with the mind-body split they perpetuate—have disrupted our ability to relate to our own bodies and to the natural world with intimacy and respect. 

Central to Jablonsky’s practice is the experience of inhabiting a body on Earth, a theme  informed by her perspective as a person who identifies with having a disability. Her paintings often convey transitional states, with figures caught between presence and disassociation, reflecting the fluid boundaries between mind, body, and environment. These moments echo the disorientation of living with pain, sensory overload, or the numbing effects of modern distractions. “I use painting,” Jablonsky explains, “to remake my relationship with pleasure, work, able-ness, and my own mind-body experience.” Through artmaking, seed gathering, and the sharing of knowledge, Jablonsky seeks to heal the fractured connections between bodies, land, and the act of care itself. The work offers a generative, and forward-thinking vision of our times. 

Kirsten Bauer’s “Cinnamon Spice” is a glossy, vermillion apple, offered like a riddle that can’t quite be solved. It is a moment of magic, a prompt for pause and puzzlement. The small ripe fruit is ornamented with a humble twig the artist collected, combining the organic with her highly technical craftsmanship of sign painting. The artist stated that this piece was informed by chance operations through a process of pouring and rolling paint in a process that could not be predicted. Bauer is a regional luminary in sign painting and graduated from the only formal sign-painting training program still offered in the United States taught continuously since 1924. 

Marjan Anvari’s intricate drawing, “Illumination in the Darkness”, is the results of her years of study and restoration of  traditional Persian illuminations or, Tazhib. Tazhib is an ornamental, colorful, and beautifying art form that predates Islam. It typically occupies the margins of a page with a purely decorative function. In an act of defiance, Anvari has rendered her work in black and gold, removing the color commonly associated with Tazhib, and thus proclaiming it as politically charged, relevant, and contemporary.

Anvari was born in Tehran, Iran. Her creative practice is fueled by her ancestors’ bravery and activism, as she shared that she and her family have painfully witnessed in their lifetimes the reversing of women’s rights and increase of censorship due to religious ideologies entangling in the Iranian government. Anvari is very active in the local arts communities, bringing people of all backgrounds together to celebrate the folklore, art and dance of Iran, while educating and reflecting with the larger public about the recent changes within this complex cultural heritage. 

Zhang Mao presents multiple never before seen abstract paintings, each born from a spontaneous storm of creative energy that overtakes the artist. Zhang Mao can get completely lost in the world around her, for instance,  a tiny detail in her visual field becomes an entire universe unto itself upon her observation. Her attention is not solely focused on rendering an image, but on the transportive process of getting lost in the image-making process. Themes of language, emotion, and day to day life emerge covertly in her dream-like work. Her abstract paintings on raw hemp canvas integrate areas of lush inky gradients as an homage to traditional Chinese paintings. Zhang Mao recently moved to Oregon from Yunnan, China and her work, both as an artist and poet, is deeply influenced by the majority of her life occuring  in China, and the generational stories of her mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. References to this influence are nested within her images, with inclusions such as birds, landscapes, and Chinese characters. She is known to hand harvest pigments from unlikely sources, such as scraping rust from old cars, or collecting fine dust from bricks. In this, her work is not exclusive to the parameters of the painting, but includes an expansive practice of interacting with the visual field of daily life, in all its chaotic beauty.