KELSEY BIRSA uses detailed rendering and abstract marks to explore everyday moments of her communities. She combines traditional oil painting techniques with the contemporary use of mixed media to reflect on the human experience and the desire to feel connected. Through her paintings, Birsa explores experiences of the pandemic and the feelings of anxiety and depression that it has created in herself and many others. In the current installation, ‘Living Room’, Birsa employs interior design elements like furniture and a hand painted mural wallpaper to set a domestic environment. The hand painted mural background features plants from the garden surrounding the Stevens-Crawford Heritage House. Experiencing outdoor spaces with friends and family, such as the colorful garden outside, has become one of the few social interactions that felt safe and normal during the pandemic. The past year has been a rollercoaster of information overload, loneliness, compassion, frustration, hope, confusion, and more. While we each experienced last year a little differently, in her paintings of these unique experiences, Birsa’s highlights that we are together in our loneliness.

About the artist
Kelsey Birsa is a painter and a muralist living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been exhibited at the Blackfish Gallery, Art At The CAVE, Gallery 360, North Bank Artist Gallery and published in the Columbian, Beacon Magazine, Pathos, and The Artist Magazine. She has received awards such as Best in Show at the Society of Washington Artists, The Artist Magazine Student Portrait Competition and first place at Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts. Birsa holds a BFA in Art Practices from Portland State University.