OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2026
5-8 PM

ON VIEW
JUNE 19 - JULY 18, 2026

FOR INQUIRES
Please contact hello@chefasprojects.com

Portland, Oregon — Emily Kepulis presents Certainties and Other Almosts, a new body of paintings that inhabits the shifting terrain between recognition and estrangement. Through subtle alterations of scale, proportion, and placement, Kepulis transforms familiar landscapes and objects into sites of perceptual inquiry, inviting viewers to reconsider the ways reality is continuously constructed through memory, expectation, association, and collective agreement.

Rather than departing entirely from the observable world, the works gently press against its boundaries. In these paintings, landscapes loosen from fixed meanings and enter a liminal space where observation merges with dream, where the familiar becomes strange and the strange gradually feels inevitable. The resulting images create moments of emotional and perceptual reorientation, carrying viewers elsewhere before returning them to themselves.

Landscape serves as a recurring vessel for this exploration, particularly the horizon line—an optical phenomenon where earth and sky appear to meet. For Kepulis, the horizon embodies a paradox of certainty and illusion, shared experience and personal projection. The paintings linger within this tension, occupying a reality that remains fluid and continuously formed through perception itself.

"I am drawn to the moment when unfamiliarity softens into recognition," Kepulis explains. "When the strange begins to feel intimate and remembered. These paintings aim to remain in that sensation—a reality not entirely fixed, but continuously forming through perception."

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 liminal states and often-overlooked moments of daily life, she locates meaning not only in transformative events but in the quiet spaces between them: light settling across a houseplant at dawn, a sheet animated by wind, or a bird suspended mid-flight. These fleeting observations become sites where presence and transition coexist.

Considering home as both a physical location and an embodied locus of perception, Kepulis creates paintings that draw from family photographs, inherited artworks, her own previous works, and anonymous found imagery. Through this process, she constructs visual palimpsests that collapse personal and collective memory. Working without fully predetermined compositions, she embraces intuition, trust, and observation, allowing each painting to emerge through reflection and transformation. This openness reflects her broader inquiry into how individuals are shaped by their environments, self-perception, and relationships to larger social, ancestral, and spiritual frameworks.

Raised in the Midwest and based in the Pacific Northwest since 2012, Kepulis studied drawing, painting, printmaking, and creative writing at Portland State University. Her work has been exhibited throughout Portland, San Francisco, Miami, and Vancouver Island, with recent presentations at Chefas Projects in Portland and Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco. She has completed commissioned murals and paintings for residential and commercial spaces across Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, including projects for Teton Lunch Counter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the 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 publication, Water Briefed.

Emily Kepulis is represented by Chefas Projects.

ARTWORK

INSTALLATION IMAGES

© CHEFAS PROJECTS
Photo credit: Mario Gallucci