Join us during our extended gallery hours on Oct 2 from 5-7 p.m. and come spend time in our Belonging Otherwise and Columbia River in VI Sections exhibits. About Belonging Otherwise Belonging Otherwise brings together the work of Epiphany Couch and Charlie-Anne Hopkins, two artists whose distinct practices converge around identity, ecology, and the layered histories of the American West. Together, their work invites viewers to reconsider how personal, cultural, and ecological narratives shape our sense of belonging within this contested landscape.

Epiphany Couch 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. Rooted in unconventional collaboration - across time, between generations, and with the natural world - her practice transforms personal and collective histories into heirloom-like objects that hold space for reflection, care, and healing.

Charlie-Anne Hopkins builds a practice deeply rooted in place. By foraging materials to create inks, sculptures, and works on paper, they establish a direct and tangible relationship with the land, transforming natural materials into works that reflect both personal experience and broader ecological narratives. Their work confronts the profound and often unsettling experience of witnessing climate change in real time - evacuating from wildfires, enduring droughts, and living amid shifting ecosystems. Grappling with solastalgia, their practice becomes a way to process grief while resisting narratives of helplessness, dismantling patriarchal myths of the American West - of rugged individualism and conquest - in favor of interdependence, adaptation, and reverence for the land.

Together, Couch and Hopkins create a dialogue between ancestral knowledge and ecological urgency, between personal memory and collective myth. Their combined practices reveal identity as fluid, relational, and deeply tied to place. Belonging Otherwise reframes the American West not as a static history but as a living, evolving terrain of identity, story, and survival - a conversation both grounded in the Columbia River Gorge and resonant with national questions of ancestry, resilience, and belonging. About the Artists

Epiphany Couch (she/her) is a spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/mixed European interdisciplinary artist and writer. Drawing on family stories, archival research, her own dreams, and her childhood in caləłali (Tacoma, WA), she works across photography, beadwork, weaving, and collage. Her recent honors include a Percent for Art commission, the Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, residencies at MASS MoCA and the GLEAN Program, and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

Charlie-Anne Hopkins (they/them) holds an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute. They have held residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Arts, Brush Creek Foundation, Mildred's Lane, Leland Ironworks, Sou'wester Arts, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Aunt Dofe's, and have exhibited nationally and internationally. They co-founded Carnation Contemporary, a cooperative gallery in Portland, OR championing emerging and underrepresented artists. Hopkins lives and works in Thorp, Washington.  About Columbia River in VI Sections Originally presented at the Gorge Museum, Columbia River in VI Sections is a series of handwoven tapestries that map the entire length of the Columbia River - from its headwaters in British Columbia to its terminus in the Pacific - across six woven segments. The fourteen dams that interrupt the natural flow of the river's main stem are called out prominently in red, tracing a visual narrative of the geological, cultural, and political history of the Columbia and the tributaries that feed it as it passes through the Gorge.

For ten thousand years before Manifest Destiny, the land along these rivers was home to a thriving Indigenous population whose spiritual beliefs and cultural practices centered on respect for the land, the rivers, and the salmon within them. In fewer than two hundred years, Western expansion has profoundly altered that landscape. The rivers and their fish have had to find new ways to survive, and the Native people who lived here for millennia have had to find new ways to be. Strasen's tapestries hold that history in the weave - the flooded villages and sacred fishing sites, the submerged burial grounds, the "disappearance" of Celilo Falls and Kettle Falls, and the salmon migrations obstructed by dams built without fish ladders.

The work arrives at a moment of reckoning. In June 2024, the U.S. Department of the Interior issued a "Tribal Circumstances Analysis" documenting the historic, ongoing, and cumulative impact of Columbia River dams on Basin Tribes - a first step toward acknowledging the damage done and exploring how to mitigate the harm. Columbia River in VI Sections gives that history a form you can stand before: a river rendered thread by thread, its power, its beauty, and its cost woven into a single continuous story.

About the Artist

Kristie Strasen built a highly successful career in New York City as a textile designer and colorist for leading companies in the interior furnishings industry before returning to her roots as a hand weaver and launching Little Weavings Co in 2017. Committed to making "things worth keeping," she creates artisanal, one-of-a-kind pieces from natural fibers - often hand spun or produced by small-batch spinners, and both commercially and naturally dyed. Known for an intuitive command of color drawn from years of building color systems for clients across North America and Europe, Strasen weaves work of unusual richness and significance.