Counts’s extensive installation Sea of Vapors is as slick and otherworldly as it sounds. It’s taken several forms traveling across Seattle in recent years, and in this current, largest iteration, it fills Oregon Contemporary’s great big space. Her ceramic humanish and animaloid sculptures are backlit with neon and accented by gold and silver luster. Life-size figures shrouded in reflective fabrics form scenes with fruits, vegetables, and insects in a disorientingly stretched scale; silver spiders crawl across faces and vampire mouths takeover eye sockets. Counts doesn’t cite specific religions or mythologies, though the show hints in countless spiritual directions. For her, this realm belongs to an unspecified “Wizard Queen,” and the figures are tributes to the women, across timelines, who have influenced her work.

Rahmanian’s debut solo show with ILY2, Maybe Tomorrow, follows a distinctly surreal series of paintings she showed with the gallery at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair in New York this spring. Born in Tehran, Rahmanian moved to New Haven, Connecticut, in 2016 for Yale’s MFA program and now lives and works there. Her paintings often blur lines between sentient beings and static objects, giving an envelope or a bell fleshy skin and stretching figures’ proportion past human parameters. She credits her inspiration to playful Farsi proverbs and Iranian literature, but also to the experience of holding her culture and language while experiencing American’s. Pictures flanked by eyelids and lashes, as if viewed from inside the artist’s mind, are becoming a signature. 

Portland curator and photographer Kate Shannon’s roving chess party, chess haus, pops up around Portland and New York. At places like Sweedeedee, SoHo House, and most recently the new magazine shop Chess Club (no relation), Shannon hosts DJs, pours drinks, and usually taps a chef to serve snacks. Guests hang out and play chess. This installment stretches things a bit. It will serve as the opening party for a chess-centric group show Shannon curated at Nationale titled checkmate that features work by several of the gallery’s represented artists, including Pace Taylor, Ty Ennis, and Dennis Foster. 

Because art is liable to take itself too seriously, couple Nancy and Theo Downes-Le Guin are curating their second show at the PSU Schnitzer museum around play. In 2023, they organized Weaving Data, a show about how textiles laid the roots of computing technology. Purposefully, Just Playin’ Around has a more diffuse thesis. While society tends to frame play as frivolous, this show looks at the many ways play benefits and is even necessary to—perhaps synonymous with—the creation of art. The show brings together an international group of artists working, in one way or another, in a state of play, including Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, known for collaborating with Louis Vuitton and Pharrell; the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, famous for his humorous sculptures and conceptual performance works; Miami’s Jillian Mayer, whose sculptures function like play structures; and Portland-based portrait artist Jeremy Okai Davis, known for depicting historical Black artists and figures. 

Mixing things up in the new year, Chefas Projects is hosting a nature-themed show of West Coast artists guest-curated by Danielle Krysa, the collage artist and writer behind the very popular Instagram, the Jealous Curator. The show thematically centers gilded depictions of nature and collects Krysa’s own work alongside Seattle painter and muralist Jennifer Ament; Vancouver, BC, modern landscape painter Meghan Hildebrand; the local artist working with pyrography, or wood burning engraving, Alexis Mixter; and Oakland-based artist and illustrator Shannon Taylor.

Heikes is a Minnesota-based sculptor and painter whose work evokes a version of the natural world. His pieces carry marks of how humans have affected the earth, and likewise how we make sense of it. This upcoming installation, Second Wave, is interested in the ways human progress leads to human destruction. Citing the ’70s New York No Wave scene as a central influence, the show will pair handmade sculptural instruments with “a haunting soundtrack that might accompany us to the edge of collapse.”