Stephanie Chefas Projects is delighted to welcome artists Jeffrey Sincich and Josh Stover for their new two-person exhibit, Other Environments. In this new collection of work, the artists offer a unique window into our urban and domestic worlds, which continue to inform their ideas and styles. Inspired by the constructed landscapes that surround us and how we interact with them, the artists believe these human made alterations weave an interactive tapestry between a city, its businesses, and its inhabitants.
Converting this figurative fabric into something tactile, Jeffrey Sincich uses quilting to represent comfort, tradition, and history. Like a handmade quilt, elements of our urban environment generate a sense of place, belonging, and safety. Both quilting material and modern cityscapes have traces of the hands that created them, making them unique in their own ways. They can be displayed, passed down, altered, mended, repurposed, or discarded. Each also signifies a part of its respective community, surroundings, and history, offering different meanings for anyone who lives with or around them.
Sincich's textile work showcases the common, everyday places and objects that have proved themselves vital to keeping a community going during the COVID-19 pandemic. Laundromats, hardware stores and produce stands have all provided essential services during this time. Constantly changing signs in windows saying “OPEN”, “CLOSED” and “50% OFF” have become common and are a reminder of the fragility of our landscape. Sincich hopes to see each of these businesses outlast the pandemic so that the adjoining communities can likewise survive.
Inspired by personal experience, artist Josh Stover explores a realm that is part-seen and part-imagined. His strikingly original still lifes evoke the nostalgia and aesthetics of days past, but feel right at home in the present. Working in acrylic and gouache, he recalls and invents interiors and objects inspired by the colors and shapes of old signs, vintage packaging, children's book illustrations, old homes, and vintage furnishings. Combining flat blocks of color with graphic shading, he alters perspectives while giving each painting a playful quality.
Stover's series of interior and still life paintings was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic. While submerged in the familiar intimacy of home surroundings (made increasingly familiar during the quarantine), he has both arranged and imagined objects and environments of personal meaning. Gifts from friends, objects collected while traveling, and family heirlooms infuse each piece with narrative, history and a quiet sense of familiarity. Some pieces in this series include depictions of his own drawings from travels, creating a "picture within a picture." Through the remembering and reimagining of places and memories--while physically confined to one space--Stover conjures his own in-between worlds.
Other Environments will be on view at Stephanie Chefas Projects from March 6 - 27, 2021. Stephanie Chefas Projects is located in Portland, Oregon at 305 SE 3rd Avenue on the second floor of the Urban Row building.
Photography by Mario Gallucci
