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 everyday.
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.
Exhibition Dates: January 6 - 28, 2023
Gallery Hours: 12-5 pm, Saturday & Sunday
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 6, from 5-8 pm
Artist Talk: Jay Ponteri will lead a conversation between Arzani and Couture on Saturday, January 27.
Location: Carnation Contemporary:
8371 N Interstate Ave, Portland, OR 97217