Happy New Year! The new year always brings fresh beginnings, chances for resolutions, and lots of glitter, sparkles, confetti and fireworks! It reminds me how despite the cold darkness of winter, light always shines brighter. This month, I want to focus on the theme of light and illumination. How can we navigate darkness with light? How does illumination show up in our everyday life? How do artists use the materiality and concept of light in their work?

Sculpted Light at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland particularly fits the theme and features work based in the Light and Space movement of the 1970s. The Portland Art Museum has a similarly on-the-nose exhibition focused on idea-driven and light considered art making. Carnation Contemporary employs visitors to navigate darkness with softly illuminated light based artworks. In Bend, Scalehouse offers a moment for pause and contemplation with light projected video, drawing, and installation works. 

one thing and another
Lynne Woods Turner 
January 17- February 28
Adams and Ollman 
418 NW 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

one thing and another showcases Lynne Woods Turner’s intimate abstract works on paper and canvas. This exhibition features mathematical investigations, scientific diagrams, graphic cartoons, art history, and dance that take the form of drawings and paintings. This work is rooted in Turner’s unique lexicon of both material observation and interior life. Inspired by Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance performance at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in 1979, Turner also exhibits work from her own Spanish Dance series. These two dimensional works illuminate the mathematical balance from the body’s movements through line and space.

Mapping Familiar Territories, Charting New Paths
Group Show, curated by Alexandra Terry
January 20- April 25
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU
1855 SW Broadway, Portland, OR 97201

Maps light the way for our modern world, but they are built on subjective narratives, laced with the values and biases of its makers. Maps define boundaries, relationships, envision possibilities, and shape our cultural, social, and political understandings of our big world. Mapping Familiar Territories, Charting New Paths reveals the personal histories, collective narratives, and addresses social and environmental concerns of our modern maps. The featured artists use diverse approaches and the language of mapmaking to transform the typical conventions of cartography to change the way we see our world.

Domestic Topographies
Colin Kippen
January 4- February 1 
Well Well Projects
8371 N Interstate Ave #1, Portland, OR 97217

Domestic Topographies marks Colin Kippen’s first solo exhibition with Well Well Projects. This show presents new, brightly painted sculptural work that take the form of vibrant cement castings to showcase the textures of everyday, domestic items such as the quilted pattern of an oven mitt or the stitching on a mattress. Vivid colors illuminate the sculpture with an ethereal glow. Drawn to the relationship the body has to everyday objects, Kippen memorializes daily routines through the intimacy of these objects.

Holding Me, Holding You
Pamela Hadley
January 10- February 1
Carnation Contemporary 
8371 N Interstate Ave #3, Portland, OR 97217

Pamela Hadley’s core strategy in her artistic practice is slowness. Handley’s act of deliberate slowness challenges a culture that reduces a person’s value to their production and productivity and prioritizes rapid consumption and outcomes. Slowness and stillness create a space for reflection, connection, and imagination of how we might remake the world. This exhibition features an immersive abstract projection-mapped animation and sound composition that explores themes of ecology, relational aesthetics, and new phenomenons. Light and darkness is intentional and deliberate. Visitors start their experience in darkness and later discover small illuminated works where they will learn to navigate the space, each other, and perhaps their own personal hidden landscapes. 

Sponsor

Be Right Back
Victoria Smits
January 9- February 27
Scalehouse 
550 NW Franklin Ave STE 138, Bend, OR 97703

Scalehouse’s newest exhibition, Be Right Back creates a pause – a space for respite and reprieve. This exhibition by Victoria Smits illuminates the gallery with impromptu deer sightings, thrifted clothing, attention drawings, and calming sounds that provide space for nervous system regulation amidst the modern notions of productivity and urgency and offers a chance to finally catch your breath. Smits pays close attention to the world around her and translates her observations into research based installations, textiles, sculptures, videos, drawings, and writings. Also on display is Thin Place, an exhibition by Hannah Jensen that hinges on the ancient concept that the veil between the material world and another world is especially thin in some geographical locations.

Color Coded
Various Artists
January 8- January 31 
Gallery 114
1100 NW Glisan St, Portland, OR 97209

Twice a year, Gallery 114 hosts juried shows to support local artists that are coming from various backgrounds, whether they are backed by a gallery or flying solo. This month, the juried show returns with a spotlight on the theme of color. Artists work with color in symbolic, emotional, structural, and conceptual ways to force the viewer to look at color in new and eye opening ways. How does color operate as a code? How does it transform through light, perception, and meaning? Color Coded explores the endless possibilities of color and how integral it is to artistic expression.

Sculpted Light
Group Show
January 15- February 28
Elizabeth Leach Gallery
417 NW 9th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

Elizabeth Leach Gallery presents Sculpted Light, a group exhibition featuring artists Dan Flavin, Peter Gronquist, Fabiola Menchelli, Gregg Renfrow, and Hap Tivey. Inspired by the Light and Space movement of the 1970s, these artists reveal how light can be shaped, contained, reflected and dispersed, and acts both as medium and subject. Sculptural illumination-activated works define form and shape. Fluorescent tubes, photographic processes, and experimental fabrications unite the physical materiality of light with conceptual medium. This exhibition coincides with the Portland Art Museum’s new exhibition centered around idea-driven practices paired with material exploration called, Im/Material which also features Dan Flavin and Hap Tivey.  

Im/Material
November 20 2025- November 20 2026
Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR

Since the 1960s, artists embraced the vibrant expansion of stylistic approaches, idea-driven practices, and material exploration. They valued conceptual medium as the foundation of art, intellectual work over the final appearance of art, and “dematerialization.” The phenomenon of light was also a prominent theme. Thought, perception, and experience was believed to be the most important aspect. Artists used collage and assemblage to challenge and explore the associations tied to certain materials and images. Though the movement is often associated with prominent male artists, this exhibition features many women artists, artists of color, and queer artists express narratives that reflect personal, cultural, and historical problems.