Stephanie Simek
August 28 - December 10, 2026
The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery presents a set of materially and formally inventive sculptures by Stephanie Simek in the Caseworks in the 糖心vlog视频 Library.
Simek is a Portland-based artist who approaches art making through material and processes research combined with metaphoric improvisation in the manner of a poet.
One case features a mini-retrospective of Simek’s tool-related works that is centered around Game of Skill (2019). Some years back, Simek discovered in a family attic parts of a spinning wheel boardwalk amusement game—Game of Skill—that her grandfather had operated in the 1940s. In fact her grandfather had patented a nested wheel version of the classic amusement. She cast these parts in gallium to produce a stripped down form that references a lathe, the tool that can produce every other tool in the machine shop. A lathe made of gallium, a metal used for electronics that melts at body temperature, would decompose itself into a shiny puddle of gallium upon operation.
In the other case, Simek has produced a new sculpture specifically made for the Caseworks that similarly references de- and recomposition, here the casting and melting of metal lines of type. Slug Matrix (a temporary configuration) takes its form from the Linotype machine used to cast the type slugs used to print newspapers and magazines from the late 19th century through the 1970s. The sculpture is cast from temporarily bound sand.
This sense of holding together and falling apart also pervades Fractal Vise with Keystone (2024), a 3-D printed fractal vise, a specialty piece of equipment used to secure irregularly shaped objects. The vise grasps hydrophobic sand cast in the form of a keystone, the stone that pushes outward at the top of an arch.
The show is rounded out by level, a minute blown glass spirit level with sand and agate inside and a series of “screws” made by trellising a climbing plant on metal clay, and two of Simek’s artist books, including loose screw (2023). Featuring 23 blind contour drawings of an ordinary screw made in sequence. As Simek drew each screw looking at the previous drawing, the form degrades or unravels across the pages of the book which is bound by an acrylic spiral or screw.
Stephanie Simek
Using a wide array of materials, Stephanie Simek makes works in two dimensions, three dimensions, sound, and performance. Select projects include a room-sized crystal radio, self-assembling keys, and an observatory tower in Corinth, Vermont. She has worked on several occasions with experimental violist and composer Jordan Dykstra, producing such collaborations as a long-distance performance involving a synchronized time-release candle and vinyl record, called a conversation between two pieces of wax, and the 2025 exhibition Binnenstebuiten (whole #33), which included a score for a video landscape made from the inside of a ceramic vessel with self-organizing glazes.
Over time, her background has evolved from building instruments from deconstructed, obsolete devices, to studying the physical properties of minerals, and later apprenticing with a physicist on the fabrication of ultrasonic sensors for the semiconductor industry. In recent years, Simek has been an artist in residence at Mass MoCA, where she received the Ford Family Foundation’s Oregon Visual Arts Fellowship; Tobichi Art Museum (Japan); A.R.E. (Netherlands); Viborg Kunsthal (Denmark); and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma). In 2024, she was a recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.