imperfecta.

The Imperfecta Gallery is excited to present Alone and Counting, featuring Portland-based artist Jennifer Gillia Cutshall. On view February 5-28 2026, this art installation critically explores the rapid degradation of personal, social and natural ecosystems in the name of convenience – and the turmoil that such a degradation generates.

 

“I am honored to create this installation in Imperfecta’s new space that promises great momentum with Daria Loi at the helm!” shares Cutshall, “It is an exciting time for the Portland art scene because Daria brings an expansive vision and she is a much-needed force of hope.”

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With Alone and Counting, Cutshall asks us to consider not only the increased control that technologies exert onto our collective and individual psyche, but also how precariously dependent we all have become. As she explains, “technology has heightened and reinforced a strange toxic vigilance (the quantification and measuring of vapid things like counting likes and followers on social media),” steering individuals and communities into isolation and creating increased opportunities for a surveillance society. 

 

Ironically, the same technology that was designed to connect us is the same that is dividing us – degrading human connection and entire ecosystems. “The time spent on screens far exceeds the time spent with face-to-face interactions or moments immersed in nature,” explains Jennifer G. Cutshall, “what would it be like if we traded half of our screen time for activities geared toward protecting the environment?”

 

In Alone and Counting, Cutshall’s sculptural-builds are vignettes narrating this perilous story through gathered and gleaned objects as well as materials that she alters using open flames, hence describing our bleak and increasingly burnt realities. In such settings, a lone bride stands among a cemetery of stumps (ghosts of the flame – tree skeletons) that hang in the balance. “She stands as a matriarch (mother earth) and a symbolic figure betrayed…” shares Cutshall, “Will this marriage and devotion to technology lead to our ultimate demise or will it just leave us more alone and counting?”

 

Cutshall engages with installations to gestate and realize ideas and spaces simultaneously – open to divergences, possibilities and adaptations. While the artist frequently engages in more traditional forms of fine art, installation art occupies the most important and primal aspect of her practice. As an artist and a curator, her conversations with space inform her installation work and create opportunities to entwine concerns with visions – anchoring her inner ruminations while holding infinite opportunities for expansion, growth, and engagement. 

 

Alone and Counting offers a unique and wondrous opportunity to not only glean Cutshall’s process but also to be touched by her longing for new realities, where social and natural ecosystems are rediscovered and re-embraced.

 

The show debuts on February 5, with an Opening Reception from 5 to 8pm.

 

About Jennifer Gillia Cutshall

Jennifer Gillia Cutshall is an artist and curator in Portland, Oregon. Her work is collected worldwide and she has designed and painted over 200 murals and public art projects. She also has curated 153 international exhibitions to date.