Inspired by the variety and vitality of Pacific Northwest contemporary art, Project NW brings TAM’s regional vision into singular focus with solo exhibitions and projects sited throughout the museum. With an emphasis on artists’ voice and vision, Project NW highlights the depth and range of artistic expression in the region.
Organized by Tacoma Art Museum and curated by Ellen Ito.
Cable Griffith: Uncanny Twilight
“Rhizome Palindrome,” 2025
Acrylic on canvas
Overall (triptych): 30 × 72 in.
Courtesy of the artist and J. Rinehart Gallery
Image courtesy of the artist
October 11, 2025 – June 07, 2026
“As a kid growing up through the early 1980’s, my sensibility of landscape space was heavily influenced by early video games and cartoons, long before I became exposed to painting as a history and practice. Now, landscape space is as much a mental space, as it is an illusionistic one.” – Cable Griffith
Mythology, technology, and pop cultural representations of nature intermingle with real places and experiences to create the expansive and beguiling wilderness of Cable Griffith’s Uncanny Twilight. Steeped in the history and practice of painting, the artist’s paintings, works on paper, and paintings on hand-dyed canvas invite the viewer into a mysterious state and place between real/imagined, tangible/ethereal, interior/exterior, and digital/analog.
Ralph Pugay
Flashe and acrylic on canvas with
collaged painted canvas
24 × 30 inches
Photo courtesy of the artist
February 14, 2026 – May 17, 2026
The works on paper, paintings, and animation in Ralph Pugay’s A Looser Understanding immerses the viewer in a layered exploration of memory that vibrates with emotion, humor, and contradiction. Through dynamic use of gesture, form, and repetition, Pugay forms non-linear connections and creates space for shifting meaning and constant discovery.
Epiphany Couch
Photo courtesy of Mario Gallucci
May 28 – August 30, 2026
Stories move through time in many forms. They live in the land, in language, in archival collections, and in family photographs. They pass from one generation to the next. They are revealed in dreams. Inč’adac (Inheritance), artist Epiphany Couch reflects on a personal desire to know the stories of her ancestors in all their complexity. She grapples with the ways ancestral stories were interrupted by U.S. policies that sought to erase Indigenous life and culture. Through this act of remembering, she explores the fullness of inheritance, belonging, and repair. Drawing on photography, beadwork, weaving, collage, and sculptural forms, Couch weaves family stories, archival research, and dreams into works that consider our stories as our greatest inheritance.
Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores generational knowledge, storytelling, and our relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds.
Working across photography, beadwork, weaving, and collage, she reinterprets traditional forms to create images, installations, and sculptural works that engage ancestral knowledge and invite new ways of understanding. Her practice is rooted in unconventional collaboration—acrosstime, between generations, and with the natural world—recognizing these relationships as vital to sustaining memory, culture, and identity.
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European, and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington). Her work has been acquired for public and private collections and exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs across the United States. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she is a member of the artist-run gallery Carnation Contemporary, the Columbia Basin Basketry Guild, and the Cyme Collective.
David Hytone
September 17, 2026 – January 03, 2027
“Over the last ten years I have been developing a visual language that grew from a studio practice that employed collage, paint transfer and a methodical construction of images built on a foundation of castoffs and off-cuts from previous work. From that language and the processes through which it was expressed, I found myself returning time and again to the oroboros-like relationship between experience, memory, and the self. A few years back, that visual vernacular began to both broaden and become more specific. New methods replaced previous approaches and thus began the shift to my current practice and the work I’m presently invested in. The ideas behind this new body of work have been, for me, as elusive as they have been revealing, and at this point somewhat difficult for me to wrap words around.
I can say this: the work is more interested in symbolism, more focused on
isolation in these “connected” times, more concerned with endeavor in the face of oblivion. It feels increasingly personal and yet more reflective of the absurdity of the world around us. At times a balm for the soul, at times a cultural ballast anchoring society to an over-idealized past, the double edged sword of nostalgia remains a frequent touchstone.
In the end I’m still figuring it out… and I realize now that those eight words alone are perhaps more effective at describing my current practice than all the words that proceeded them.”
-David Hytone
David Hytone received his BFA in Fine Arts from the Minneapolis
College of Art and Design after studying briefly at the Osaka University
of Arts in Japan. He has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally,
including shows in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Miami,
Minneapolis, Portland, Sun Valley, Brussels and Ghent, Belgium. A
recent visiting artist and lecturer at Penn State and Indiana University,
He has work in numerous private and corporate collections including
Microsoft, Facebook, Capital One, Swedish Hospitals, Hilton, SeaTac
airport and the permanent collection of King County, WA.
A 2024 MacDowell Fellow and 2018 Neddy finalist in painting, David
currently lives and works in Tacoma, WA.