2024/25 Artists
Epiphany Couch
Epiphany Couch is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she presents new ways to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to create images and sculptural works that hold space for reflection, transforming from mere things into precious objects — intimate and heirloom-like.
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington) in the shadow of təqwuʔməʔ (Mount Rainier). She attended the Tacoma School of the Arts and earned her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Puget Sound. Her work has been shown at Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), Gallery Ost (New York, NY), Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), and The Bellevue Art Museum Education Gallery (Bellevue, WA), among others. She is a 2024 Studios at MASS MoCA resident, recipient of a 2024 Ford Family Foundation’s Oregon Visual Artist Fellowship, and a commissioned artist for Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she is a member of Carnation Contemporary Gallery.
mai ide
mai ide is a Japanese-American artist from Tokyo, now based in Portland, OR. Their multidisciplinary approach investigates their own cultural intersectionality and deep ambivalence as an immigrant, mother, and woman. As a non-native speaker of English, ide’s practice is expressing discomfort of being classified or perceived by society as an “other” or “forever foreigner” in the U.S. ide's use of salvaged fabric and Sashiko stitches conveys their simultaneous vulnerability, fragility, and ferocity under a constrained, violent, and volatile society. ide holds a BFA in Art Practice from Portland State University (OR) as well as degrees in sewing, pattern making, and textile design in Japan, where she worked for twelve years as a material designer. Their previous exhibitions and performances include the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Kyoto in Japan, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Oregon. ide is a current MFA candidate in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland.
Diane Jacobs
Born in Southern California, Diane Jacobs grew up surf-fishing, creating potions, and drawing incessantly. At age 12, she and her family traveled to Japan, planting the seed for a lifelong interest in cross-cultural understanding. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Diane discovered her deep connection to forests, feminist thinking, and social justice. Her work continues to be informed by the cross-pollination of these elements. She makes artist books, installations, mixed-media sculptures, and works on paper influenced by research, personal experience, community engagement, and a conviction that art inspires change.
In 1991, Diane received an International Rotary Foundation Graduate Scholarship to study in Italy for 8 months. In 1996, she received her MFA in printmaking from San Francisco State University and received a Leo D. Stillwell Graduate Scholarship. She also was awarded a James D. Phelan Award in printmaking (1997), a Kala Art Institute Fellowship (1997), and an Artadia award (2000). Diane moved to Portland in 2002. She received several Regional Arts and Cultural Council Project Grants (2005, 2008, 2012, 2019, & Arts 3C Grant in 2024), RACC Professional Development Grants (2009, 2014), Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission/Ford Family Foundation (2010, 2015, 2020, 2024). Diane was a recipient of the following Artist-In-Residency Awards: Women’s Studio Workshop (1999), Signal Fire (2013, 2017), Kala Art Institute (2017), PLAYA (2016, 2024), Leland Iron Works (2018 -Golden Spot Award), Pine Meadow Ranch (2019), In Cahoots (2019), Township 10 (2024), and GLEAN (2024/5) Her prints, sculptural work, and artist books are in The Portland Art Museum, The Getty Research Institute Library, SF MOMA, the De Young Fine Arts Museum, Achenbach Foundation, The New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Walker Art Center, and over 60 other university and public institution’s special collections.
Chris Lael Larson
Chris Lael Larson blends photography, painting, and installation to create colorful, confounding viewing experiences. His work is about creating a deeper experience of the subject matter by combining multiple views and renderings along with its material elements. In his work, he constructs temporary altar-like installations using photographs, paint, found objects, and natural elements that he documents using a hyperreal lighting style. The resulting images are then painted upon and integrated into installations that reincorporate the original source materials. His work has been described as a contemporary kind of Fauvist-inspired Cubism with its emphasis on depth, layered perspective, and color.
Chris has shown work in over 30 cities across the US, with notable exhibitions at the Berkeley Museum of Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Nationale, Redcat, and Spring/Break Art Show. He is a member of Carnation Contemporary and Wave Contemporary in Portland, OR, and is a recipient of the Regional Arts and Culture Council Make | Learn | Build Grant. He received his BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he was awarded the Irwin Scholarship for the Visual Arts.
Marsha Mack
Marsha Mack holds an MFA in Ceramics and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women’s and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, as well as a BFA in Ceramics from San Francisco State University. Working primarily in ceramic and installation, Marsha’s artistic practice blurs the line between sculpture and grocery shopping. In earnest pursuit of happiness, abstract vessels in built environments serve as carriers of multivalent identities that exist in constructed versions of paradise, adorned with a visual vocabulary of personal symbols culled from a lifelong fascination with Asian supermarkets. Her ongoing interest in cultural consumption and the formation of identity serves as a wellspring for embellished objects and installations that play to the subconscious, honoring playfulness and introspection as equals.
Marsha is the Assistant Director and Head Curator of Galleries & Exhibitions at the Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University in Portland, OR, a ceramic instructor, and a practicing visual artist. She has presented her artwork with the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Denver, CO); Black Cube Nomadic Museum (Englewood, CO); The Galleries of Contemporary Art (Colorado Springs, CO); and Skylab (Columbus, OH); among others. Marsha was the 2022 summer artist in residence at The Priscilla R. Tyson Cultural Arts Center, a 2023 Fall Artist in Residence at The Columbus Printed Arts Center, and a 2023-24 recipient of the Greater Columbus Art Council and Columbus Museum of Art’s Visual Arts Fellowship.
