Touchstone Gallery intern, Aileen Beringer lays her life on the floor in her senior thesis at the Corcoran's 2014 NEXT Exhibit of student work. Titled "I Only Cry in the Shower," the installation is located in a darkened space about 12 feet by 12 feet on the second floor of the museum. It is constructed of broken sheets of glass, a video, written stories, and a suspended field of crystals and jewelry elements. An overhead video projects portraits of Aileen through this rain of hovering crystals onto shattered mirrors resting on the floor. The images are fleeting, changing quickly so that no coherent picture emerges either on the ceiling or the floor - just flickers of a face transformed into colored light by the prism on the floor.

Marcia Coppel Figures of Speech

May 5, 2013 Touchstone Gallery

You might not have guessed it, but the quiet artist we know as Marcia Coppel spent many years as a speech pathologist in the Montgomery County Public Schools. As a child she was drawn to the visual arts, graduating high school with a major in art. After that her studies at George Washington University took her in the direction of speech therapy, which became her major and her field of expertise after securing a post-graduate degree from the University of Maryland.