Anna Hepler and Seth Koen

Anna Hepler is a sculptor and printmaker based in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Hepler’s work, which is both hand-held and architectural in scale, overturns first impressions. Wire forms flatten into drawings, clay impersonates metal, plywood coils like rope, plastic inhales and exhales. She values embarrassment, uncertainty, blunder, and fragility as active agents in her studio process.

A former Henry Luce Foundation fellow in Seoul, South Korea, Hepler has completed residencies at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, the Tamarind Institute, the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, the Archie Bray Foundation, and MacDowell. In 2016, Anna Hepler was awarded a fellowship by United States Artists, in 2018 a grant from the Harpo Foundation, and in 2019 a Nancy Graves Foundation fellowship. Most recently, she received an individual support grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in 2021. Hepler has exhibited widely, and her work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine, amongst others.

In my work, I am engaged in the endeavor of drawing, using line and mass in space and on paper to investigate how we see and experience the world. I am seeking to activate a room with an object the way I do with a line on paper. I am drawn to the perceptual flip that can happen, where the flat becomes dimensional, when front becomes back – the liminal space where two dimensions become three and three become two. My interest lies in making, but not in doing it the right way. I love the materials I use, but they are a means to an end and not the meaning of the work. I am working to embody my questions and curiosities with slow improvisation, each move a reaction to the last. I am curious to see where this leads. —Seth Koen

After receiving a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, Seth Koen earned his MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. He has shown widely, including shows in the San Francisco Bay area at Gregory Lind Gallery, C2C Project Space (in collaboration with Gary Peterson), Rena Bransten Gallery, the Richmond Art Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Adobe Books, the LAB, the Thomas Welton Stanford Gallery and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Koen was recently included in the 2018 CMCA Biennial at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. His work has been shown with Jeff Bailey Gallery; LABspace; Richard Levy Gallery; and Galerie Hafemann in Wiesbaden, Germany. Koen has been the recipient of the Trefethen, Cadogan and Kala Art Institute Fellowships, and the Jay Defeo Prize. Seth Koen also works in the Art Department at Amherst College. This is the artist’s second exhibition with Pamela Salisbury Gallery.