States of Matter Western Landscape Interpretations by Rachel Kessler
Published on Oct 7 2025College of the Redwoods presents: States of Matter: Western Landscape Interpretations by Rachel Kessler
On-campus gallery show, Tuesday, October 21 – Friday, November 21.
A public reception and artist’s talk will take place in the gallery on Wednesday, October 29, 2 – 4 pm.
The artist will lead a hands-on workshop: Making Pigments from Recycled Materials Thursday, October 30, 12 – 2 pm in CA 102 (located next to the gallery).
CR’s Floyd Bettiga Gallery is thrilled to announce an exhibition of vibrant, surreal paintings examining landscape interpretation across the western United States. The work investigates signs and images we use in contemporary life to understand the environment and its shifts.
States of Matter focuses on climate change and the need for us to recalibrate our personal relationships with the environment. For hundreds of years, the western US has been processed and described, even promoted, through landscape painting. The paintings in the show utilize this history to create a sense of agency and continued history in appreciation of these landscapes for which we are imperfect stewards, bringing our own layers of interpretation to express an ephemeral and emotional layer in the strata of geological or earth centered time.
In Kessler’s on-campus workshop, Making Pigments from Recycled Materials, participants will use found and recycled materials - both synthetic and organic - to make pigments directly from our environment. These pigments will reflect the landscape as it is: a constantly shifting space that negotiates human intervention and natural processes. The College of the Redwoods community and public are welcome to join and create their own color pigments using non-toxic, simple materials!
Rachel Kessler is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts BFA program in 2004 and Art Center College of Design MFA in 2010. Recent exhibitions include The Garden with Ladies Room, Los Angeles 2024, Let’s Start with Beauty, Maybe Its Fate, Louisville Kentucky 2024, and Beauty is a Blast, Art Cake, Brooklyn New York 2025. Her recent paintings and prints explore environmental change, geological time, and ephemera, working with the temporality of our landscape. Over the last several years she has also designed and taught arts-based workshops for individuals, private and public groups, non-profits such as the Gesundheit Institute, and arts collectives such as Maybe It’s Fate in Louisville, Kentucky.
Admission to the Floyd Bettiga Gallery is free and open to the public Tuesday through Friday 11 p.m. to 3 p.m. and by appointment. For more information, visit www.redwoods.edu/about/bettiga or call the Division of Arts, Communication, and Education office at (707) 476-4559