Caitlin Pashalek spent years building worlds that only had to convince a camera. Visual development, art direction and production design for film, much of it in stop-motion, where every surface is made by hand at arm’s length and still has to read as real on screen. Her studio practice is largely self-taught, and it carries that training everywhere: an eye for how an illusion is built, and a maker’s itch to find out where it breaks.
If you don’t make three things that end up in the garbage, you’re not trying hard enough.
She starts with play. No sketch and no predetermined outcome, just a material, a process and the question of what happens next. She tests, iterates and follows whatever sparks, pulling in unusual mediums and techniques she finds along the way. The paintings she brings to Portland are built from layered acrylic base coats and a charcoal paint she mixes herself, drawn into fields of fine concentric line that swell into cones, folds and strata.
The forms read as architectural and geological at once. They have weight and volume, and they refuse to obey perspective, gravity or light. From across the gallery a shape looks monumental and somehow still floating. Up close the simple geometry comes apart into something far less orderly. She leaves the edges dirty and the canvas bare around them, so the illusion is carefully built and then broken on purpose. Born in Buffalo, Wyoming, and based in Portland, she also works in printmaking, collage and sculpture, and her work is carried by EWF Modern in Portland.
At Hopscotch Portland she takes the featured gallery from October 7, 2026, following Ningshu Fang. A Portland artist in a Portland gallery. Walk up on the work slowly. It changes the closer you get.
