“Mood Ring” exhibit coming to Nightingale Gallery

“Mood Ring” exhibit coming to Nightingale Gallery

LA GRANDE, Ore. – Eastern Oregon University’s Nightingale Gallery begins its exhibition season with “Mood Ring;” a merging of multi-media collage works by Portland-based artists Morgan Rosskopf and Katherine Spinella. The exhibit opens on Friday, Oct. 6 at 5 p.m. with a reception for the artists.

As an adjunct to the exhibition, the artists will present a public talk in which they will give insight into their studio practices and the motivations behind the exhibition. The artists’ talk will take place on Thursday, Oct. 5 at 6 p.m. in Huber Auditorium, Badgley Hall. The public is encouraged to attend both events.

“Our bodies feed off the colors in the natural spectrum of light, with each color affecting a specific emotion or body part. Albeit a small aspect of perception, light, and color have the ability to not just change how our eyes see, but also how our minds interpret, “ said the artists. 

The exhibition is an immersive experience that invites viewers to embody and contemplate the beauty and complexity that symbolism, fiction, and truth have in shaping our perception.

Rosskopf and Spinella have been friends and collaborators for over a decade. The artists share a desire to integrate their independent, process-driven works and cultivate new experiences through cross-pollination. Taking a free-associative approach to making, Spinella and Rosskopf disrupt image and material hierarchies to antagonize assumptions about our heavily fragmented and constructed realities. Using collage as an infrastructural guide to making, their works transport the refuse of commerce and daily life into a poetic abstraction that emerges between the seams of representation. “Mood Ring” is an ecosystem of deconstructed symbols amassed in a process of renewal-based gestures that make space for something new to occur. 

Multi-media paper, print, and spatial works are integrated by the use of colored light to cultivate an immersive experience that reflects on ideas of visual and sensual perception with an esoteric curiosity. Paying homage to the light artists of the 1960s, while also engaging with new-age ideas of spirituality and chromotherapy, “Mood Ring” rejects the notion that our perception is fixed and embraces its malleability.

Morgan Rosskopf is based in Portland, Oregon. Working primarily on paper, she takes a collage-based, mixed-media approach to building her work. She states, “From an incoherent mess of texture, my multidimensional drawings are completed by refining a composition through color, collage, and extensively cutting the paper. My interests meditate on duality, beauty and its many inverses, the perception and creation of reality through images, and the jumbled mess of the subconscious collective. All elements come together in various combinations, creating worlds in which light, shadow, and form coalesce into a stable equilibrium.”

Rosskopf received her MFA in Fine Art from the University of Oregon in 2013 and has shown her work nationally and internationally since. 

Katherine Spinella is an artist and organizer. Her research is focused on themes related to the attention economy, digital culture, and our social understanding of nature through language. She is a collage-based artist who employs printmaking, digital tools, sculpture, and video as primary mediums to raise questions about how we consume and relate to images, icons, and symbols. “Using a playful, free-associative approach I create new narratives centered on labor, attention, and time that transform the refuse of commerce and everyday life into acts of renewal,” says Spinella.

The opening reception for “Mood Ring” will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 6 and visitors may see the exhibit through Friday, Nov. 3, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. 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 artists please contact Gallery Director Cory Peeke at cpeeke@eou.edu.