2 Women Walk into a Gallery: Ilknur Demirkoparan and Jennifer Pochinski

Ilknur Demirkoparan is a Turkish-born American artist who currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.  Her interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance and digital media.  Demirkoparan’s art explores the intersections between political power and the narration of history by tracing her own identity in time and space.  She describes her work as “striving to locate something for which I have no name yet; a yearning deeply influenced by my position as a Turkish-American migrant belonging neither here nor there.”  While her early work evokes the bizarre and often baffling narratives of identity and otherness, with her current work, Demirkoparan explores the tension between erasure and endurance through the abstract language of kilims which she translates into paintings.  Demirkoparan has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BA from the  University of California, Riverside.  Her awards include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Max H. Gluck Foundation fellowships.  A curated series of Demirkoparan’s oil on canvas and acrylic on canvas paintings will be featured in the group exhibition.

Jennifer Pochinski is an American figurative painter who was raised in Hawaii, spent much of her early adulthood traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe and since late 2010 has been living and creating her art primarily in California.  Pochinski’s works are characterized by gestural marks and painterly abstractions.  She attempts to “approach painting in its purest form” and acknowledges that her ideas are inseparable from the process of creating her art.  As a result, relationships, male-female power dynamics and autobiographical elements are central themes in much of her work.  Pochinski received her BFA in Painting from the University of Hawaii and her works have been exhibited in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle, among other locations.  In addition, her art has appeared in several leading publications, including The Paris Review, The Huffington Post and  American Art Collector.  A select series of Pochinski’s oil paintings on canvas will be included in the group exhibition.