Emily Kepulis is a mixed media visual artist and muralist based in Portland, Oregon. Her practice investigates home and selfhood as fluid, relational constructs shaped by memory, perception, and lived experience. Attentive to the liminal and the often-overlooked intervals of daily life, Kepulis locates meaning not only in formative events but in the quiet, quotidian spaces between them. These in-between moments, light settling across a houseplant at dawn or dusk, a sheet animated by wind, a bird suspended mid-flight, become sites of heightened awareness, where presence and transition coexist.

Through scenes that exist in states of becoming, neither fully here nor there, Kepulis’s subjects embody transition as a generative force, suggesting that identity itself is continually formed within these thresholds.

Kepulis considers home as both a physical location and an embodied locus of perception, one that is continuously rewritten through time. Her paintings draw from family photographs, artwork from her lineage, her own past works, and anonymous found images, creating visual palimpsests that collapse personal and collective memory. Working without fully predetermined compositions, she relies on trust, intuition, and observation, allowing each painting to arrive through a process of reflection and transformation. This openness mirrors her conceptual interest in how individuals are shaped by their surroundings, their self-perception, and their relationship to a larger whole, interrogating humanness as a personal, social, ancestral, and spiritual condition.

Midwest raised, Kepulis relocated to the Pacific Northwest in 2012 and graduated from Portland State University, where she studied drawing, painting, printmaking, and creative writing. Her work has been exhibited across Portland, San Francisco, Miami, and Vancouver Island, with recent presentations at Chefas Projects in Portland, Oregon, and Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco. She has completed commissioned murals and paintings for residential and commercial spaces throughout Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, including Teton Lunch Counter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a ceiling mural at the entrance of Kimpton Hotel Enso in San Francisco. Her paintings have been featured in Suboart Magazine, I Like Your Work Magazine, and Create! Magazine, among others. Her writing has appeared in The Gravity of the Thing and in her first solo printed publication, Water Briefed. Emily Kepulis is represented by Chefas Projects

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