In the Gallery
i had this dream and you were in it
Opening Reception: Friday, March 13, 6-8PM
On view until April 12, 2026
Women’s Studio Workshop presents i had this dream and you were in it, an exhibition of new work by Ollantay Avila Alcocer, Carissa Kolcun, and Kimberly Jo.
On view through April 10, 2026, the exhibition asks: What does it look like to explore multiple possibilities of dreaming in the studio? Over the past four months, the artists have worked across papermaking, printmaking, and bookbinding to meditate on alternate realities and imagined memories. Moving between individual and collaborative processes, they create intimate, layered works that reflect a shared longing for connection.
Alcocer, Kolcun, and Jo are interns at WSW. This nearly 50-year-old program offers young people interested in a career in art or nonprofit management valuable hands-on training and studio access. Interns receive a stipend and housing on WSW’s campus.
i dream and wake and feel the separation between myself and the dream. Time bends and collapses upon itself, offering endless possibilities; i am unable to discern the dream from reality. That which is immaterial is finally able to be held, and felt. Your skin against mine, that’s how i can tell I’m asleep. In dreams there is always the chance i might see you again, the distance between us foreshortened by the desire to hold you close; you are only a night’s sleep away. if i asked tomorrow would you remember my touch?
About the Artists
Ollantay Avila Alcocer | @ollantay.xyz
Ollantay Avila Alcocer is a Mexican-American artist, designer, and writer from Dallas, Texas. Interested in ornamentation, collection, and annotation, her practice explores everyday design languages, motifs, and the ways in which we visually communicate identity. She challenges traditional notions of authorship and instead looks towards collaborative, DIY, and open-source communities and modes of making. Through writing and language, typography, photography, collage, and printmaking, she considers layered meanings and balances contradictions–irony and sincerity, efficiency and chaos, analog and digital–to capture a multitudinous, dissonant, yet thoughtful voice. In 2024, she graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design.
Carissa Kolcun | @carissanicole._k
Memory is the basis of Carissa’s practice. The work they create engages recollection through combinations of symbols, textures, and sounds. In their practice, memory is as necessary as it is unreliable. The dream is a memory that contorts the present; the present is actualized through the process of remembering. As John E Drabinski states in Glissant and the Middle Passage, “Memory is about the future. Perhaps memory is for the future.” Exploring memory through relation, the work Carissa creates coalesces material to articulate interwoven futures, imagined futures that encompass more than human history. Through memory, they interweave disparate connections between the self, the body, history, and the earth.
Drawing from traditions of printmaking, ceramic, and textile crafts, Kimberly’s work seeks to preserve memories, objects, and other ephemera of the everyday. This documentation serves as both an expression of reverence and an archive of abundance that may be drawn upon in leaner times. They are interested in commonplace ritual, and the through lines between performance and sincerity, ornamentation and utility, and the archival and ephemeral. Working primarily with secondhand, found, or repurposed materials, they explore expressions of nostalgia, labor, and longing, as a means of recording the intimate relationships between human, animal, machine, and earth.
Gallery Hours are 9:00-5:00, Monday-Friday or by appointment
Check out WSW’s Past Exhibitions