Erica Meryl Thomas
Contradictions I & II
2022
Plywood, Printed newspaper, gesso, ink, silkscreen print
In this diptych, @ericameryl compiles articles published during the early stages of the pandemic, exploring shifts in the culture of work, responses to “the great resignation,” and renewed demands for better working conditions to meet the moment.
Erica Meryl Thomas is propagating roses in the gallery as a living piece. This work references the labor of organizing—the deep care and Herculean effort necessary for the even the smallest wins—as well as the “bread and roses” slogan associated with the labor and women’s suffrage movements. This slogan, coined by Rose Schneiderman in 1912, argues that every worker deserves not only to have their basic needs met —the metaphorical “bread”—but also to enjoy life’s “roses”: art, leisure, and creativity.
Propagation IV: Struggling to be born
2026
Rose cuttings, rooting compound, soil, transparent acrylic containers
@ericameryl
📸 @erikpatakphoto
Erica Meryl Thomas
“We don’t dream of labor”
2022–ongoing
Audio voicemail recordings
Responses to the questions:
“What have you given up for work?”
“What would you do with your time if you didn’t have to work?”
Come by and listen to the searing yet hopeful responses callers left on the hotline; you can even leave a message yourself.
@ericameryl
📸 @erikpatakphoto
“Afterwork” by Erica Meryl Thomas opens Friday, 5-8pm. Thomas writes:
“This exhibition is a manifestation of my ongoing research and artistic/political praxis, organizing in the labor movement as an industrial unionist in education, and thinking as a conceptual artist, questioning capitalism, and imagining and building a future where it is obsolete.”
@ericameryl
Julia Rooney, RGB 9, 2026
Rooney’s recent paintings measure ten inches square, but the images have an evasive scale: at times, they seem to open onto a microscopic world, and at others onto a vast landscape seen from above. RGB 9 is somehow both an aerial view and a Petri dish.
@somehightide
Next Friday: join us for the May Day opening of “Afterwork” by Erica Meryl Thomas!
Erica Meryl Thomas is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, educator, and organizer living in both Portland, OR and Bellingham, WA. Her work explores labor, value, exchange, and the various ways art and political movements influence each other. She often invites participation or works collaboratively with others as an embedded artist to uncover stories through personal interactions. The resulting projects take the form of installations, storytelling, documentary, interventions in public space, conversations, printmaking, publications and books, performances, and other forms. She organizes education workers as Co-Chair of her adjunct faculty labor union, Portland State University Faculty Association AFT local 3571, as an at-large member of the United Faculty of Western Washington, and she co-chairs the Portland Democratic Socialists of America’s organizing committee Labor Working Group. Her work in political struggle, as a teacher and as an artist are intertwined, each informing the other.
@ericameryl
This is the final week of our current show, “Feels like,” by @somehightide and @shawoshashaw . Email us to visit! [email protected] 💌
Shaw Osha
11 hours, 12 minutes of daylight now
watercolor and pencil on paper
4 x 4 in (each), 2025–2026
A trio by @shawoshashaw and an RGB painting by @somehightide cluster around a faint horizon line.
Shaw Osha, The dark months are here like when Mina knows Dracula has arrived, 2025-26
Julia Rooney, RGB 8, 2026
@erikpatakphoto 📸
Artists Julia Rooney and Shaw Osha printed out months of their coast-to-coast correspondence, pasting it it to the wall at eye level in a sort of textual horizon line that wraps around their show.
Come look and read; we’ve extended the show through April 26th!
@somehightide@shawoshashaw
Photos @erikpatakphoto 🙏
Shaw Osha’s sensitive, small-scale works register shifts in her pacific northwestern climate: dispatches from Olympia, WA. @shawoshashaw
Shaw Osha
Water and air mixed all the way through
watercolor on paper, 4 x 4 in, 2026
RGB 16, RGB 3, and RGB 6 are from a series of paintings completed exclusively in the colors red, green and blue: RGB color. RGB color models are used in electronic, light-emitting devices like phones, televisions and projectors, shaping how we view images in our technological world.
Julia Rooney limits her palette to the RGB triad to explore the distinct possibilities of this artificial color space, yet her pieces somehow reverse the digital palette‘s feel, bringing to mind moss, spores, and dappled light in the forest.
@somehightide
