Too many of us are "Alone & Counting." Let's get together at Portland's newest gallery and gather around this luminous new light in the Pearl, Daria Loi's IMPERFECTA!

I was honored when Daria Loi asked me to create an installation in Imperfecta’s new space. The space promises great momentum with Daria at the helm!

Daria Loi, Founder of Imperfecta

(Me with the haul)

When I delivered the first rounds of work by Uhaul, I began to imagine and adjust my notions. For me, installations carry the gestation of ideas and are not necessarily built for the outcome, but arriving in concert with responses. They are the act of realizing ideas and spaces at once, alive with possibility and adaptation!

In this way, installation art occupies the most primal aspect of my art practice. As an artist and a curator, the magnetism of realizing environments anew informs my work and is the essential thread of discourse to my inner ruminations. 

My upcoming, “Alone and Counting” install will unfold soon. It will be part mirror reflecting turmoil about the rapid degradation of "spaces" in the name of convenience. The ever-growing, insatiable dependence on technology plays a key role here (foreboding for both the individual and the planet).

A strange toxic vigilance now exists in the screened spaces we occupy. They encourage the quantification and measuring of vapid things (for example: counting likes and followers on social media) and steer us into more isolation (and surveillance). This artificially driven system touts connectivity but will be the death of connection (and ecosystems).

The time spent on screens far exceeds the time spent with face-to-face interactions or moments immersed in nature. What if we traded even a quarter of our screen time for activities geared toward protecting the environment?

Ghost Bride's Galloping Truth by Jennifer Gillia Cutshall

My sculptural-builds are vignettes meant as a glimpse at this periled story.

In this setting the lone figure of the bride stands among flame kissed stumps. She

stands as a matriarch (or mother earth) and a symbolic figure betrayed.

Will this marriage and devotion to technology lead to our ultimate demise or will it just leave us more alone and counting?

Opening Reception

Thursday,

February 5, 2026

5-8

IMPERFECTA

809 NW Flanders, Portland OR

Exhibition runs through March

Artist Talk February 14th 11:30

It is an exciting time for the Portland art scene. Daria brings an expansive vision, and she is a much-needed force of hope. It's been fun to work on an install in this environment while Daria prepares her new, massive gallery space. She brings enormous spatial and design chops that match the scale of the new location.

(Photos of Daria working tirelessly to get her massive new gallery space ready. Even electronics!)

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