Feast your eyes on our new series of studio visits with Oregon artists.
Brought to you with generous funding from PICA and Ford Family Foundation.
Melanie Stevens investigates narrative as a site of reflection or reinforcement of societal power structures and over-determined norms, specifically the manner in which stories (both real and fictional) supposedly centering people of the African diaspora have a long history of appropriation and erasure. Her intent is to research and seek out these marked narratives, based on a predetermined set of rules and criteria, and to re-appropriate them, using a variety of media. In doing so, she illuminates the destructive resonance of these flawed narratives by juxtaposing a reimagined version that centers a nuanced and oft-ignored humanity in such a way as to appear irreverent or banal, as if it were the norm. She also empowers herself with these stories by reclaiming them as her own and resolving the dissonance of cultural amnesia, while encouraging opportunities for meditation and discourse.
Stevens is an artist, illustrator, and writer. She is the creator of the graphic novel series, WaterShed, and the founder and director of black whole Press, a printmaking studio that hosts free workshops and provides resources, funding, and residency programming for artists from marginalized communities. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Yale University and her Master’s of Fine Arts degree in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she currently teaches.
Momo Gordon is a self-taught artist focused on the emotional landscape based in Portland, OR. They work primarily with graphite and handmade paper and their work explores sentient spaces, hostile architecture, and anthropomorphized objects. In sequential works or standalone pieces, characters often have four walls. You may have seen their work with Fisk Projects, Saint Heron, or Nieves Books.
Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores generational knowledge, storytelling, and our relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds. Working across photography, beadwork, weaving, and collage, she reinterprets traditional forms to create images, installations, and sculptural works that engage ancestral knowledge and invite new ways of understanding. Her practice is rooted in unconventional collaboration—across time, between generations, and with the natural world—recognizing these relationships as vital to sustaining memory, culture, and identity.
Couch’s work transforms personal and collective histories into heirloom-like objects that hold space for reflection, care, and healing. Drawing from family stories, archival research, her own dreams, and her childhood in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington), she creates work that is both intimate and expansive, blurring the line between artifact and art.
As a spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/mixed European artist, Couch centers cultural knowledge and community connection in both her process and presentation.
Vo Vo (they/them) explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+, and disabled communities. They are the editor of an internationally renowned publication, a speaker, educator, a curator, an artist, and a musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Singapore, Croatia, Mexico, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden, Malaysia, and the United States. In their transdisciplinary art, they work in textiles, embroidery, audio, video, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy, and colonization.
Yuyang Zhang (b. 1993, China, he/him) is a Wuhan-born, Portland-based artist whose studio practice reflects lived queer diasporic experience through the lens of ridiculous pop culture ephemera in the style of campy melodrama.
Stay tuned for more!
Want to check out our Ikea Residency video collaboration? Watch the videos here.