OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2025
5-8 PM

ON VIEW
SEPTEMBER 26 - OCTOBER 25, 2025

FOR INQUIRES
Please contact hello@chefasprojects.com

PRESS

Chefas Projects is delighted to present Endless Repose, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Nicole Williford. In this deeply personal body of work, Williford reimagines her grandfather’s photography through the lens of memory, sensation, and her own painterly voice. The exhibition marks a significant shift in the artist’s practice, from works grounded in direct observation to those that blur the lines between recollection and interpretation.

Set against the hot, Summer landscape of her mother’s childhood, these paintings draw from a family archive of photographs, yet resist the urge to replicate. Instead, Williford transforms these quiet images into meditations on time, place, and the emotional textures of the past. Figures speak candidly. Shadows flicker across dusted roads. The landscape unfolds slowly, insistently. The scenes are familiar, even ordinary, but through Williford’s eyes, they become portals into something enduring.

Each composition embraces disruption: cropped views, suspended gestures, and ambiguous spaces invite viewers not just to observe, but to enter. In this way, the paintings are not memories re-told, but experiences re-lived. The viewer becomes part of the moment, encouraged to linger, to feel, to remember.

"Through painting this archive, I am looking back into a world that is partially told to me, partially imagined, and completely unreachable," Williford shares. "It’s a reckoning with how quickly time moves, how memories fade even as we try to hold on."

Endless Repose honors the in-between moments that make up a life, the fragments we often overlook, yet which hold the greatest meaning. In slowing down, in paying attention, Williford offers a quiet reverence for the ordinary.

The opening reception for Footnotes will take place at Chefas Projects on Friday, August 22, 2025, from 5-8 pm. Located in Portland, Oregon, at 134 SE Taylor Street on the first floor of the Taylor Works building, Chefas Projects invites the public to explore this exhibition, which will be on view through September 20, 2025.

Nicole Williford (b. 1994) is a painter whose work spans from precise realism to abstract fields of color, reflecting a broad range of formal training and personal exploration. Trained in traditional portraiture, Williford uses painting as both a meditative practice and a means of processing the sensory overload of daily life. Her work is rooted in personal narrative, exploring themes of nostalgia, memory, and identity.

Williford holds a B.A. in Studio Art from George Fox University. Her work has been exhibited nationally, with shows in Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. In 2022, she was awarded the Stumptown Fellowship in Portland, Oregon, the Vermont Studio Center Residency Award in 2023, and in 2025, she received the Golden Spot Residency Award at Caldera Arts Center in Sisters, Oregon.

ARTWORK

INSTALLATION IMAGES

© CHEFAS PROJECTS
Photo credit: Mario Gallucci