A Thousand Words Will Never Tell the Whole Story
Renee Couture
March 10 – April 24, 2025
Gallery Talk: April 24, 2025 at 3:00pm in the Esvelt Gallery
Closing Reception: April 24, 2025 following the talk
The Esvelt Gallery is proud to present Renee Couture: A Thousand Words Will Never Tell the Whole Story. The exhibition runs from March 10-April 24, 2025 with an artist talk on April 24 at 3:00 pm with a closing reception to follow in the Esvelt Gallery. Motherhood is the focal point of Couture’s work since becoming a mother five years ago. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice, encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Artist Biography
Motherhood is the focal point of Renee Couture’s work since becoming a mother five years ago. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice, encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Couture graduated from Buena Vista University (Storm Lake, IA) with a BA in Studio Art and Spanish. She moved to Oregon in 2004 after completing Peace Corps service in Bolivia, South America. She received her MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT. Couture taught in the Fine Art Department at Umpqua Community College for over a decade. She currently works as a project coordinator for Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.
Couture’s work has been exhibited nationally in group exhibitions and as a solo artist. She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship and three Career Opportunity Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, and three Individual Arts Grants from the Douglas Country Cultural Coalition. Couture has been granted artist residencies at PLAYA Program, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and Ucross Foundation.
Currently, Couture lives on seven acres in rural southern Oregon with her husband, five-year old daughter, and dog. She works out of a retrofitted 20-foot travel trailer-turned-studio space in her garden
Artist Statement
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence. The murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves. and blissful gratification and tenderness…. (Adrienne Rich)
Motherhood is a hero’s journey. It’s a journey inward and downward to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know what there. (Jessi Klein)
Since becoming a mother just over 5 years ago, I have made work addressing my desire to understand my own fragile relationship with motherhood. I realized I needed to completely change my art practice if I wanted to keep an art practice. I needed a way of working that would allow me to dip in and out. Armed with her iPhone, ink, and a thin brush, often as little as 20 minutes, I do something. Anything. Through this, I developed a diverse and project based art practice using sculpture, photography, and drawing.
The projects in this exhibit show works that show my journey through this brutal and bewitching period, showing a combination of romance and reality. One reality, shown in My Life is Plagued by Should, addresses the reality that 1 in 7 women nationally experience symptoms of postpartum depression (including me). The work Soft Ambition explores small daily rituals as markers of accomplishments through repeated images and flocked objects. Hero’s Journey photographically documents my current self-interacting with my three- and four-year-old selves. I look back to my childhood seeking answers of how my upbringing impacts and informs my relationship with parenting. Covered Up in Dailiness shows tender images of my daughter and I on delicate structures that may (or may not hold). In both Hero’s Journey and Covered Up in Dailiness, I leave thin ink trails with a tiny brush; the accumulation of lines is not concerned with experimentation in line variation or imagery. It is a commitment to my inhalations, exhalations, endurance, and the softening of and within myself. My project, You Will Forever Be More Than Enough, was inspired by my daughter entering kindergarten and invites viewer participation. This work addresses holding on and letting go, as being a parent requires letting go and holding on to their ever-evolving person for the rest of your life. Accepting that we are, indeed, different people.
Gallery Hours:
8am – 8pm Monday thru Thursday
8am-noon Friday
The Esvelt Gallery would like to thank the ASCBC for their support.
For more information, please email the CBC Gallery Director at gallerydirector@columbiabasin.edu.
