Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present new Gallery Artists Andy Curlowe and Emily Kepulis in their first exhibition at the gallery. The artists explore the delicate interplay between memory and the fleeting nature of time and space. Memories, much like dreams, often emerge in vivid colors —bright, intense, and sometimes surreal. They are ephemeral, slipping through our grasp even as we try to hold onto them, yet they linger, shaping our sense of self and our perception of reality.

This exhibition brings together works that capture the transient beauty of moments, invoking the vibrancy and intensity of dreams. The use of vivid colors in these pieces is a testament to the power of memory to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

It is in these moments of heightened reality that we often find the essence of our experiences, even as they fade into the past.

Andy Curlowe's work deals with the juxtaposition of nature and industry. Influenced by the mountainous landscape of his childhood, Cleveland’s industrial shadow, and the sublime power of nature to both create and destroy, Curlowe’s paintings are a balance of structured lines and the ambiguity of billowing smoke. These works explore the blurred boundaries of natural forms and planes encountering the sharp geometry of human calculation. Geo-forms saturated in color, dance and grow amongst natural forms, which flatten as they expand. Lines streak in and out of focus inferring an architectural vernacular. Each line narrates the illusion- all while emphasizing the void.

Andy Curlowe was born on the other side of the Mohawk River from Schenectady New York, a region that resides between the Adirondacks and the post boom remnants of industrialism. Raised by a wildly independent and creative mother, Andy and his sister were encouraged to wander the woods and paint teepees made from old bed sheets. Andy studied painting and drawing at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly Massachusetts. Soon after graduation, Andy and his wife Laura moved to Cleveland Ohio, in search of affordable living and studio space. There they discovered a dynamic and approachable art scene. After living and working in Cleveland since 2006, Andy feels a strong connection to his adopted city. Andy's work references the landscape's of both his present and past.

Emily Kepulis references family photos, artwork from her lineage, her own past paintings, and anonymous found photos in further exploration of how we are shaped by that which surrounds us, our perceptions of ourselves, and our attachment to the self in relation to the whole. In layering paint, image, pencil, and archive, Kepulis rehearses the cobbling together of humanness: personally, socially, ancestrally, and spiritually.

Emily Kepulis is a mixed media visual artist and muralist living in Portland, Oregon. Her work explores the concepts of home and selfhood and how they are shaped by memory and experiences, recurrently changing and nonlinear. Materializing into imagined landscapes that often home soluble, ambulating figures, Kepulis’s paintings acknowledge home as a physical place as well as a place within the body and a locus of perception. Each layer takes on an immortal quality, albeit much of the time buried by more paint, reflecting the impermanence and adaptability of all we call home, all we call selfhood, as well as their permanence in the present moment and in memory.

Emily Kepulis, Midwest raised, made her way to the Pacific Northwest in 2012 and graduated from Portland State University where she studied drawing, painting, printmaking, and creative writing. Her paintings have been shown in galleries around the United States, Canada, and the UK, most recently Blue Shop Galleries in London and Soft Times Gallery in San Francisco. She has been commissioned for murals and painting projects in both residential and commercial spaces, notably at Teton Lunch Counter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a ceiling mural at the entrance of Kimpton Hotel Enso in San Francisco. You can find her writing at the online magazine "The Gravity of the Thing'' as well as in her first solo printed publication titled "Water Briefed." Her paintings have been featured in New Visionary Magazine, Suboart Magazine, and I Like Your Work Magazine, among others.