Cope House Gallery Presents: The Places we Carry

March 3rd – April 28th | Mon–Fri 10 AM – 4 PM | Cope House Gallery, 1 Awbury Rd, Philadelphia

Join us this spring for The Places We Carry. A collection of paintings exploring the self by Pragya Gupta. In this exhibition, the artist explores the question of what it means to hold multiple, often contradictory identities at once. The paintings investigate this through fragmented figures, overlapping spaces, and layers that accumulate like memory—some marks visible, others buried, all of them present. The artist is particularly interested in liminality: threshold spaces where one is neither fully one thing nor another.

See The Places We Carry at the Cope House Gallery this March!

About the artist: 

Pragya’s work explores liminal spaces, colliding realities and the search for identity—what it means to live in perpetual transition, never quite feeling rooted in any single world, never quite feeling that you belong. Her art asks: is it even possible to unmask, cross a threshold and feel with certainty, “this is who I am”?

Born in a small town in India in a culture where creative pursuits were forbidden, Pragya’s journey took her to Philadelphia for an MBA at Wharton, then to London for a career in finance, before she found her calling in art. She now lives in Philadelphia.

Her work invites viewers to reflect on the paradoxical tensions we all navigate: the security of a career we know versus the not-so-quiet whispers of another purpose, the familiar masks we wear versus the unsettling journey of discovering who we truly are.