Epiphany Couch Strong Spirits, 2024
Mixed media installation
Variable dimensions
Presented by Dreaming in Public with Nato Thompson
An installation dedicated to artist Epiphany Couch’s grandmother and great-grandfather, Strong Spirits is a tribute to the enduring legacy of generational knowledge. Through family photographs, delicate beadwork, and sculptural objects, Couch honors the complexities of heritage, identity, and family relationships. She creates a space where the anger and loss embedded in family lines can be transformed to promote healing and connection-building across generations.
Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she presents new ways to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to create images and sculptural works that hold space for reflection, transforming from mere things into precious objects — intimate and heirloom-like.
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington) in the shadow of təqwuʔməʔ (Mount Rainier). She attended the Tacoma School of the Arts and earned her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Puget Sound. Her work has been shown at Oregon Contemporary (Portland OR), Gallery Ost (New York, NY), Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), and The Bellevue Art Museum Education Gallery (Bellevue WA), among others. She is a 2024 Studios at MASS MoCA resident, recipient of a 2024 Ford Family Foundation’s Oregon Visual Artist Fellowship, and a commissioned artist for Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon where she is a member of Carnation Contemporary Gallery.