Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast. Read on for this month’s column from Hayashi.
Sculpted Light
Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR
January 15 – February 28, 2026
I once attended an artist workshop where we discussed cyanotype printmaking in complete darkness. We were ushered into a basement, the lights switched off, and asked to speak about light while being deprived of it. The next day, at a different workshop, we were blindfolded and guided outdoors, and instructed to walk for an undisclosed amount of time. On both occasions, I felt disoriented, untethered. Eventually, I sat down and let my body touch the grass. It was in that stillness that I felt the light of the day all over me.
In Sculpted Light, a group exhibition inspired by Elizabeth Leach’s closeness to the Light and Space Movement of the 1970s, the light feels similarly estranged from its usual motion, seemingly stuck as an elusive solid matter. The gallery’s overhead lights are dimmed, yielding authority to the artworks, which cast ambiguous reflections onto the floor. The artwork’s forms extend downward in soft blurs. Concrete is tinted with diluted blues and oranges.
I try to make sense of each artwork by tracing its biographies back to ecology—where light began. Light becomes a wandering moon suspended in the atmosphere, driftwood headed towards collision or embrace, desert sand flushed at daybreak, algae nested in water, a linen curtain breathing through dusk. The exhibition becomes a speculative landscape where light becomes a memory of the earth’s gestures.
The language of Light and Space often reads as sterile, clinical, the vocabulary of hospital waiting rooms, where everything feels detached from living. At first, Sculpted Light seems to be exactly what people name it. But then I remember sitting in the grass and feeling the light. I trace the sculpted light back to its source. Even when fluorescent, even when industrial, even when plugged into a wall, light remains as evidence of our shared ecologies. Whether intentional or not, these sculpted lights are insistent on earth and sky.
Reflection: Where is your favorite place to experience light?
Felicia Chiao: It Doesn’t Have To Be So Hard
Nucleus Gallery, Portland, OR
February 7 – March 1, 2026
Lately, I’ve been circling the feeling of isolation and how seductive it can be to fold inward, to let nihilism become a companion, and to mistake solitude for safety. But isolation is also an oppressive technology of power that keeps us small and separate, and though it may seem easy now, survival is a collective labor that becomes nearly impossible when you have to do it alone. It is through this labor of surviving together that resilience is cultivated, the kind of resilience required to reach the future.
This is why I find myself drawn to the upcoming solo exhibition by Taiwanese American illustrator and designer Felicia Chiao, It Doesn’t Have To Be So Hard, at Nucleus Portland. In a teaser shared on their Instagram, Chiao reflects on how caring for themself has made them resilient and their urge to share that resilience with us. In their work, the illustrator creates worlds that linger in momentary and everyday interiors—mental, domestic, emotional. Their work meditates on depression, anxiety, and the invisible ache of loneliness, embodied through an ambiguous, ungendered figure.
The character’s expression is usually obscure and somber, which seems to directly contrast the light, airy, and color-saturated setting they’re situated in. Chiao’s background in industrial design emerges in the architectural geometry of their imaginative environments, but the spaces are softened by an emotional essence. Their illustrations feel like paused moments, between movement and stillness. I often reflect on photography when I encounter their work online, and I look forward to finally seeing some of it in person.
Reflection: How are you cultivating resilience in your life?
—Hayashi Wilder