PAUSE/PLAY: Gallery 4Culture Online

While our physical space is closed and our exhibition season is on pause, we are trying something new! To support and spotlight Gallery 4Culture artists, we’ve commissioned virtual experiences that offer a creative break from life in quarantine.

Visit studios, learn how this nebulous time is being recorded, discover strategies for staying connected, and even download original digital backgrounds for your Zoom meetings! Explore the profiles below and check back often—two artists/artist teams will be featured every month.

Rebecca Cummins

Rebecca Cummins explores the sculptural and experiential possibilities of light and natural phenomena in installations that have included a machine for making rainbows, sun and moon pointers, and a variety of approaches to marking time. Recently, she has imaged bioluminescence and cell mitosis with a widefield UV microscope. An Ars Bioartica residency, at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station (U of Helsinki) in far northwest Lappland, Finland scheduled for June 2020 was postponed. Instead, she began working in her backyard, enlisting a variety of field instruments for observation. Cummins has exhibited internationally and is also active in public art and cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists, scientists, and community partners; she is a Professor in the School of Art + Design + Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle.

rebeccacummins.com

Ko Kirk Yamahira

For Seattle-based artist Ko Kirk Yamahira, the finished painting is a beginning rather than an end. Painstakingly removing individual threads from the weave of the canvas, he deconstructs his paintings, turning surface into form. Yamahira has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Japan, both individually and as a member of the artist collectives SOIL and Art Beasties. He is represented by Russo Lee in Portland and studio e in Seattle.

kirkyamahira.com
@kokirkyamahira
Gallery 4Culture Profile

Melinda Hurst Frye

Melinda Hurst Frye is a Seattle-based artist and educator. By way of observation, experimentation, and slow investigation, her practice centers themes of ecology and place in photographs of the Pacific Northwest landscape. She holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Hurst Frye’s work has been featured on Humble Arts Foundation, Lenscratch, and WIRED Photo and exhibited widely throughout the United States. She is represented by J. Rinehart Gallery.

mhurstfrye.com
@mhurstfrye.photo
Gallery 4Culture Profile

Ann Leda Shapiro

Ann Leda Shapiro grew up in New York City and in the 1960s migrated west to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and UC Davis. During the 1970s, she taught criticism, the creative process, and the interrelationship of the arts at San Francisco State University and for the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Semester at Sea program. Shapiro later found her way to the University of Arizona Tucson and Austin, TX, where she taught painting and life drawing. After a friend’s diagnosis in the 1980s, she began volunteering at an acupuncture clinic for people living with AIDS and discovered that Chinese medicine resonated deeply with the ideas she explored in her artwork. Compelled and curious, she enrolled in acupuncture school, illustrated the history of Chinese medicine, and became a board-certified acupuncturist in 1991. Shapiro now lives on Vashon Island and was just awarded a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

annledashapiro.com
@annledashapiro
Gallery 4Culture Profile

Stephanie Simek

Stephanie Simek uses a wide array of materials, making work in two dimensions, three dimensions, time, and sound. Her projects have included a room-sized crystal radio, a spacesuit indicator badge, and an observatory tower in Corinth, Vermont. Simek has produced exhibitions and had residencies at Signal Culture, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Melanie Flood Projects, PDX Contemporary, Littman Gallery at Portland State University, Feldman Gallery at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Fairbanks Gallery at Oregon State University. She's lived in the Pacific Northwest since 2007.

stephaniesimek.com

Kelsey Fernkopf

Kelsey Fernkopf is an experienced artist, neon tube bender, and educator. After earning a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Kansas, he apprenticed with Fred Elliott to learn neon sign making. Kelsey moved to Seattle in 1986 and has been challenging the boundaries of the medium ever since. He recently co-founded the non-profit Western Neon School of Art and serves as its technical director. His contemporary light-based sculpture has been exhibited in galleries and museums both locally and nationally.

wnsaseattle.org
@kfasshat
@wnsaseattle

Junko Yamamoto

Junko Yamamoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She always knew that she wanted to be an artist and left to study abroad at the age of 16, ultimately earning a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts. While oil painting is her primary medium, printmaking and mixed media installation are becoming a more regular part of her practice.

Yamamoto has exhibited at SAM Gallery and King Street Station, created installations for Off the Walls at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and Out of Sight, and participated in group shows at SOIL and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum as a member of the Japanese collective Art Beasties. She's received numerous grants and awards, including an Emerging Artist Grant from the Allied Arts Foundation, a GAP Award from Artist Trust, and an invitation to the Professional Artist-in-Residence Program at Pratt Fine Arts Center. Her work is held in collections at Microsoft, Google, Swedish Medical Center, UW Medicine, the City of Bellevue, and King County.

junkoyamamoto.com
@junkoyamamotostudio

Erin Elyse Burns

Erin Elyse Burns earned her BFA from the University of Nevada and an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she currently resides. She is an Assistant Professor at Cornish College of the Arts and her work has been exhibited at Jack Straw New Media Gallery, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Burns has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Westfjords in Iceland and received awards from 4Culture, the Office of Arts & Culture, The New Foundation, the Sierra Arts Foundation, and the Nevada Arts Council. She was also a Fulbright Arts Finalist.

erinelyse.com
@erinelyseburns
vimeo.com/erinelyseburns

Philippe Hyojung Kim

Philippe Hyojung Kim grew up in a small town outside of Nashville, TN and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2013. His work –objects and environments that exist in the space between painting and sculpture– often references queer identity, artificiality, and language. He has exhibited nationally, at galleries, museums and alternative venues in Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, and Seattle.

Philippe is a member of SOIL and a co-founder/curator at Specialist, an experimental art gallery in Pioneer Square. He received his MFA in Painting from Central Washington University and currently lives and works in Seattle with his husband, Drew, and their dog, Jack.

philippepirrip.com
@philippepirrip

Cicelia Ross-Gotta

Originally from Kansas, Cicelia Ross-Gotta earned her BFA in Sculpture from Colorado State University in 2015 and her MFA in 3D4M (sculpture) from the University of Washington in 2017. That year she also became a mother.

Ross-Gotta's work has been exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, and Gallery 4Culture. She was awarded a GAP Grant from Artist Trust in 2018, an Art Projects Grant from 4Culture in 2019, and is a 2020 resident with the Seattle Residency Project.

www.ciceliarossgotta.com
@rossgottac
Gallery 4Culture Profile

Carlos Brache

Cuban-American artist Carlos Brache creates work in which images and objects overlap. He employs a mix of representational and abstract techniques as layered and complex as his identity. Growing up in Southern California, Brache struggled to find his place between the America in which he was born and the Cuban culture in which he was raised. This dichotomy continues to inform his practice. Brache received his MFA in Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2016 and, when not in the studio, he works in healthcare as an organ donation and family advocate.

@cachicolibri

Jenny Riffle

Jenny Riffle graduated from Bard College in 2001 with a BA in Photography and completed her MFA at School of Visual Arts in 2011. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in numerous publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, Telegraph Magazine, Glamour, NPR and VICE. Riffle's monograph, Scavenger: Adventures in Treasure Hunting, was published by Zatara Press in 2015. Recent awards include Artist Trust’s Grants for Artist Projects, FotoFilmic’s BMNF Award, The Pilkington Prize, PDN’s 30, and the Aaron Siskind Grant. It’s Raining… I Love You, her forthcoming book with with Molly Landreth and Minor Matters, celebrates love, enduring friendship, and queer female identity. Riffle lives in Seattle and teaches at Photographic Center Northwest.

www.jennyriffle.com
@jennyriffle
Gallery 4Culture Profile

Nate Clark

Born in Olympia, WA, Nate Clark received his BFA from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2010. The open spaces and public lands of Northern Nevada became a strong influence on his work. After ten years in the Great Basin, Clark moved to Seattle to pursue an MFA in painting and drawing at the University of Washington, graduating in 2018. During this time, his practice shifted from painting to sculpture; he began tying nets as a means of embodying the mark-making process.

Clark currently lives on Vashon Island. He works as a studio assistant for his mentor, UW professor emeritus Denzil Hurley, and teaches Art 101 as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Puget Sound, where he is also the Art Department studio technician.

www.nathanandrewclark.com
@nateclarkoly
Gallery 4Culture Profile