‘The Full and the Fleeting’ Opens Nightingale Gallery’s 2025–26 Season

“The Full and the Fleeting” Opens Nightingale Gallery’s 2025–26 Season

LA GRANDE, Ore. – Eastern Oregon University’s Nightingale Gallery opens its 2025–26 exhibition season with “The Full and the Fleeting,” a solo exhibition by Portland artist Elizabeth Arzani. The show explores how language shapes experience and memory, asking what it means to live with—or hold close—particular words.

The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist on Friday, October 3, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Arzani’s work investigates language as a shifting, paradoxical medium. In “The Full and the Fleeting,” she pairs printmaking and ceramics with text and ephemera to create installations guided by the homonyms “whole” and “hole.” These simple variations in spelling suggest contradictions that echo throughout her practice. Moving between two and three dimensions, Arzani’s works transform paper and clay into meditations on absence, presence, and the spaces language creates—whether as an entry point, an exit, or a place to sit with a question.

“Elizabeth’s installation invites us to consider the words we live alongside and the layered connections between language, imagery, and form,” said Cory Peeke, director of the Nightingale Gallery.

An interdisciplinary artist and educator, Arzani lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She has exhibited nationally at institutions such as the University of North Carolina, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and the Seattle Art Fair, as well as internationally in Luxembourg and Australia. She is a member of the Portland-based artist collective Carnation Contemporary. Arzani earned her MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and her BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Arzani will present a public artist talk on her studio practice and the conceptual framework behind the exhibit. The talk will take place on Wednesday, October 1, at 6 p.m. in Huber Auditorium, Badgley Hall.

“The Full and the Fleeting” will be on view through Friday, October 31. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, follow the Nightingale Gallery on Facebook and Instagram.

To request images of artwork for publication, or to schedule an interview with the artist, please contact Gallery Director Cory Peeke at cpeeke@eou.edu.