Purrbox
Corrine Woodman Gallery
Reception + Poetry Reading: Thursday, December 17, 5:30 – 7:30 PM
About the exhibition
Across roughly 10,000 years of shared life, cats and humans have developed an intimate companionship. Studies of cat–human interaction suggest that gentle petting can shape emotional and physiological responses, including oxytocin release, a hormone involved in bonding and the body’s stress response.
PURRBOX is an installation by Merridawn Duckler and Anastasiya Gutnik exploring the cat-human relationship. Visitors are invited to enter, touch, crawl through, and linger. Somewhere between a den, a nursery, and a hiding place, the installation unsettles the boundary between human and animal. It offers a space for play, tactile attention, and peculiar comfort.
People are also reading…
Reception and open mic details
You’re invited to signup here to read at the PurrBox Poetry Open Mic. Join Duckler, Gutnik, Editor of the Willawaw Journal, Rachel Barton, and other invite poets for a playful animal-themed reading and open mic night on Thursday, December 17, 2026, 6 PM.
Poets of all ages are invited to read animal-themed poetry. Bring a poem about a beloved pet, an encounter with a wild animal, a creature from memory or myth, an animal you fear, an animal you miss, or the animal you are.
General event attendance is free and open to the public, there is no need to register if you’re interested in being an audience member.
We will make every effort to hear as many voices as possible during the program, however, participation is subject to available time. Arrive early and register using the red button to the left!
About the artists
Merridawn Duckler is a poet, curator and text-based installation artist at Blackfish Gallery in Portland. She curated the first land art show in Oregon. She’s the author of Interstate (dancing girl press), Idiom (Harbor Review) Misspent Youth (rinky dink press) and Arrangement (Southernmost Books). Recent artwork appears in literary magazines Poetry Society of New York, Barcopa Literary Review, Blue Mesa Review, Raw Lit and an art play in the Ekphrastic Issue of Gasher. Her work also appears in the most recent 2025 Best Small Fictions.
Anastasiya Gutnik is a Russian-born artist whose work explores migration, memory, ecology, and the histories held in materials. Working with soil, salt, ash, bones, plants, textiles, and found objects, she considers what gets displaced, what remains, and how people and landscapes leave traces on each other. These materials, their physical qualities, cultural meanings, and ecological roles, often become the starting points for her work.
Through video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and performance, Gutnik explores how relationships with the natural world and one another take shape and are passed down through generations. Her projects unfold at different paces, from quick, improvised drawings, to durational performances and installations, to observations of places recorded over the span of several years.
Gutnik received her BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, then moved to New York City, where she spent numerous years participating in exhibitions at galleries like Local Project, A.I.R Gallery, Plaxall Gallery, and many other spaces. She has participated in several residencies worldwide, including La Wayaka Current in Chile, Mudhouse in Crete, and GlogauAIR in Berlin. She completed her MFA in 2023 at the University of Oregon, and her thesis installation Memory of Returns was displayed at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Eugene, Oregon. Anastasiya currently works in her studio in Portland and is a Blackfish Gallery member-owner.
