Gallery’s first fall exhibition features work of Oregon artists

Renee Couture’s, “in the quiet of these great distances.” Tea bags, collected plants and mapping pins (2012).

Gallery’s first fall exhibition features work of Oregon artists

Contact: Cory Peeke | Nightingale Gallery Director
541-962-3584 | cpeeke@eou.edu

September 24, 2013
LA GRANDE, Ore. (EOU) – The fall exhibition season for EOU’s Nightingale Gallery opens with a presentation of works by two distinct Oregon artists.

Renee Couture, of Glide, is featured in the main gallery space presenting a body of work entitled “To the Rumored Garden.” The smaller front gallery area is dedicated to showcasing the mixed-media installation “Cascade” by Carolyn Hopkins, of Portland.

The exhibition opens Friday, Oct. 4 and also coincides with La Grande’s new First Friday Art Walk. There will be a reception from 6-8 p.m. in the gallery in Loso Hall.

“Couture and Hopkins each examine the complexity of our world through their highly engaging works,” said Cory Peeke, Nightingale Gallery director. “Visitors are presented with an exhibition of compelling objects and installation that ask us to reflect on and reconsider the familiar. We are pleased to bring the work of these two exciting western Oregon artists to the attention of the eastern Oregon community.”

Couture’s work is exhibited nationally and examines the relationships between capitalism, community and the environment.  Through the lens of bio-regional ethics and postmodern environmentalism, her work considers the interdependence between people and the environment in a quest to uncover the modern connection and disconnection people have to their surrounding landscape.

Primarily in the form of sculpture, photography and installation, Couture’s work tends to be more conceptual in nature. She is most attracted to materials that come from daily activities—ubiquitous materials that become invisible, forgotten or thrown away.

Couture graduated from Buena Vista University with a bachelor of arts in studio art and Spanish in 1999. She spent the next four years traveling throughout the U.S. and South America. She moved to Oregon in 2004 after completing Peace Corps service. She earned her master of fine arts in visual art from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier in 2010.

Hopkins’ work pulls the wild and unfamiliar into the domestic realm. Through combining items, materials and imagery from culturally oppositional territories, she creates a new hybrid space which allows for a reconsideration of the familiar. Her work questions the conventional cultural roles of the feminine and masculine, as well as the tamed and untamed, and creates moments from which to reflect on the world.

Hopkins received her master of fine arts in sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2011, and a bachelor of fine arts in interdisciplinary arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2006. In addition to her studio practice she is the founder of “Homeschool,” a non-traditional venue for community-based projects and events run primarily out of her home and backyard. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been published in Sculpture Magazine.

The show will run through Friday, Oct. 25. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. For more information visit www.eou.edu/art or follow Nightingale Gallery on Facebook.