Tess Bidelspach was born in Romania and raised in Portland, Oregon.  Her practice, developed in the context of various art-focused adult day programs, represents an intense, focused, and highly specific engagement with unorthodox materials.  She fusses over mannequin heads–cutting their hair, covering them in paint or marker, fixing them to unlikely bodies–to produce three-dimensional assemblages that seem equal parts occult experiment and doll play. In her distinctively hypnotic works on paper, she pushes Crayola markers past their breaking point and buries simple figures of animals, aliens, and fairy godmothers behind sheets of blurred color.  These haunted, noise-washed landscapes evoke such disparate references as Poltergeist’s static television, UFO photography, and the soft-focus canvases of Gerhard Richter or Georges Seurat.