AMY BAY // oh deeear me

On view April 4–May 10, 2026
Opening reception Saturday, April 4 (2–4pm)

Nationale is pleased to present oh deeear mee, a solo exhibition of new paintings, monotypes, and works on paper by Portland-based artist Amy Bay. The exhibition takes its title from the song of the Golden-crowned Sparrow, often described as sounding like “oh dear me.” Both plaintive and hopeful, it reflects a central quality of Bay’s work: its emotional tenor.

Many of the paintings begin with simple flower-like shapes that gather within crowded fields. Bay draws loosely from historical decorative sources—particularly French domino papers and early English wallpapers—but treats patterns as flexible rather than fixed. The compositions move between ornamentation, landscape, and abstraction, while suggesting social arrangements that take on a sense of companionship.

Material plays an essential role. Paint behaves differently on silk, burlap, linen, canvas, and panel, altering how color settles and ultimately, how it reads to the eye. In the largest painting, It’s good in the dark, repeating motifs approach the scale and rhythm of wallpaper. However the work feels less like a contained image and more like an immersive field. The imagery is activated by electric greens, pops of yellow, and a range of pinks, arrived at through accumulation, at once sickly and sweet.

The monotype series Heirloom (1–5), made in Portland at Atelier Meridian, begins from a shared fragment of wallpaper but shifts with each pull, allowing variations in color, placement, and mark to emerge. In the Project Room, Our Ladies, a group of twenty small works on paper, is installed in a tiled formation suggesting a larger papered wall, where individual images function alone and together.

Throughout the exhibition, Bay returns to the same motifs again and again, the point where pattern loosens and gives way to charged spaces. It is here that familiar forms reveal the care and intimacy of her gaze, showing how feeling resides not only in the image, but also in its making.

Amy Bay (b. Elkhart, IN) is a painter based in Portland, OR. Bay holds a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Winchester School of Art. She also completed the London-based Turps Banana Correspondence Course for painters. Bay makes decorative floral paintings. She values the subjective, the emotional, and both the mysteries and traditions embedded in the painting process. Bay has exhibited her work in spaces on the West Coast including Nationale, La Loma Projects, Ditch Projects, Melanie Flood Projects, Adams and Ollman, and SNAG Gallery, as well as throughout New York City at Peninsula Art Space, The Painting Center, The Drawing Center, Printed Matter, Brooklyn Public Library, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has shown internationally in group and solo shows, most recently at Casa Santa Ana in Panama City, Panama. Additionally, she has been awarded grants and projects from Oregon Arts Commission, ARTXIV, and Forest For The Trees, The Rauschenberg Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Stelo, the Regional Art and Culture Council, The Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donné Papermill, and Women's Studio Workshop. Bay is represented by Nationale.

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