March: Red Matthews and Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton
EXHIBITION DATES: March 6th – March 28th, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: 1st Friday Reception, March 6th, 2026, 5:00 – 8:00, free and open to the public
GALLERY HOURS: Fridays 12:00 – 8:00 PM, except day of exhibit opening: Saturdays 12:00 – 8:00 PM
EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION:
EAST GALLERY - Red Matthews Presents “Prophet’s Thumbprint”
Prophet’s Thumbprint is a solo exhibition by painter Red Matthews. The exhibition presents a new body of oil paintings that revisit the iconography of the American West through moments of quiet intimacy and emotional restraint.
Red Matthews’ work reexamines the visual language of Americana through scenes that blur myth and lived experience. His paintings distill nostalgia, labor, and longing into compositions that feel at once familiar and quietly unsettled, shifting focus away from spectacle and toward interior, human moments. Through pared-down compositions and a restrained oil painting process, Matthews invites viewers to consider the emotional weight embedded in cultural imagery—how closeness, vulnerability, and memory complicate inherited narratives of the American West. “I’m interested in the space between myth and lived experience—where tenderness, restraint, and longing complicate the stories we think we know,” says Matthews. Based in Portland, Oregon, Red Matthews is an oil painter whose work draws deeply from the iconography of Americana, particularly the American West. Raised in the Midwest, his early connection to rural landscapes continues to inform his practice. His work has been exhibited at:
● 1997 — St. Louis Artists’ Guild, St. Louis, MO
● 2000 — Alexander Hall Gallery, Savannah, GA
● 2001 — Alki Arts, Seattle, WA ● 2008 — 157 Gallery, Portland, OR
● 2012 — Compound Gallery, Portland, OR
● 2023 — Howard Gallery, Coeur d’Alene, ID
Prophet’s Thumbprint marks the completion of a three-year project, bringing together works that reflect a sustained investigation into intimacy, mythology, and the emotional residue of place.
WEST GALLERY - Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton, "Inishowen Abstractions"
The Inishowen peninsula is the northernmost region of Ireland filled with peat bogs, gorse laden hills, cattle, standing stones, chapel ruins, abandoned farms and wild craggy beaches. During the summer of 2025 Saranac Art Projects member artist, Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton, spent six weeks in this Donegal landscape on a farm that has been in a single family for generations. The fields, once filled with cattle, are now a rewilded meadow of wildflowers, birches and a dense gnarl of trees known as the “fairy forest.” She spent time collecting wildflowers, rusted wire from neighboring farms, peat, seaweed and shale. These materials became the palette for this collection of paintings. The exhibition includes a series of abstracted landscapes that emerged organically after long bike rides, walks on the beach, and days of rain.
