Epiphania is a habitat for life-giving and life-sustaining arts and practices.
Please visit our site often for updated newsletters, art galleries and events, such as open art studios, retreats, workshops, presentations, and other offerings, including:
DIY Devotions: From Pop-Up Pilgrimages to Street Novenas
Slow Time: Rest, Reset, Resist
“Orange is the New Blues”: Healing Practices (e.g., Nonviolence, Restorative Justice / Practices, the Work that Reconnects)
About the Studio and &&&
“Our altar, the world.
Our canvas, the universe.”
~ Carrie Rehak
About the Studio:
In 1990, Carrie wrote a pithy artist statement that remains true today: 'My paintings are my prayers.' Even her paintings depicting 'secular' subjects — seas and skies — are, to her mind, 'sacred': they contemplate light, natural and supernatural, fleeting and eternal, in, on, and through form, human and other-than-human.
In 2000, Carrie opened Epiphania, above Sagrada, in the Temescal area of Oakland, California. In 2010, after a life-altering event, she relocated her studio to beloved Crockett, an unincorporated town where the Carquinez Strait meets the San Pablo Bay. The transformation of the studio, from a storage space to a “sacred site,” with a motif inspired by wayside shrines and santuarios, was both literal and metaphorical, intended to evolve indefinitely.
In 2020, partially due to the pandemic, more as part of a deeper metamorphosis, Carrie made the painful yet clear decision to close the brick-and-mortar studio in Crockett. Where is Epiphania now? To quote Kit White in 101 Things to Learn in Art School: “The studio is more than a place to work: it is a state of mind.”
About &&&:
&&& is an outgrowth of Epiphania, and a product of day-to-day personal and communal experience and practice as well as proximate and remote, sacred and secular, ancient and future-oriented inspirations and influences, from restorative practices and performance art to creative protest and new cosmology. Although it is reflective of Carrie’s grounding in the Catholic tradition - or, more accurately, in Catholicity - it is primarily a fruit of friendships, with pilgrims, seekers, imagineers, innovators, and change-makers. It also reflects moments, however fleeting, of communion with the other-than-human. It is in hope - what French philosopher Gabriel Marcel describes as the "memory of the future" - that we offer this venue, creative, collaborative, and constructive, to share life-giving and life-sustaining practices, that we may be more just, more merciful, more inclusive, more connected, more vibrant, more engaged, loving, more whole — that is, more fully alive.
About Carrie Rehak
Carrie realizes her creative, intellectual, and spiritual aspirations through a variety of modes and media, including restorative practices, nonviolence, and the arts.
As a Work that Reconnects and Restorative Justice practitioner and facilitator, Carrie has been weaving both modes into her work, and personal and community life, since 2013, when she attended a life-changing training with Joanna Macy, Anne Symens-Bucher, and other community members at Canticle Farm, in Oakland, California. Along with the Work that Reconnects, Carrie finds life giving Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which she also began training in and practicing in 2013. In 2014, Carrie earned a certificate in Restorative Justice with Simon Fraser University, where over the course of a year she learned techniques in mediation, harm prevention, and trauma healing, as well as additional ways to help communities create safer and healthier environments, in a variety of settings. She is also committed to and a lifelong learner of diversity, anti-oppression, racial justice, and decolonization.
Her approach – what Carrie finds most enlivening, transformative, fruitful, and authentic to who she is – is "art for life's sake": ethical aesthetics, theopoetics, and art/life, thanks in large part to the influence of such luminaries as Deborah J. Haynes, Linda Mary Montano, Maren Hassinger, and other contemporary visionaries who attempt “to dissolve the boundaries between art and life" (Montano), sacred and secular, personal and political, process and product, and ritual and performance.
Carrie received her M.A. and Ph.D. in theology, with an emphasis in the arts, from the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley. She has held positions in nonprofit leadership and as an instructor and director of programs in educational settings - forums that challenge as well as keep real, meaningful, and concrete her training and interests.
Her quest is one of meaning: What is the relationship between our experience and our reflections on and expressions of our experience? How does this relationship bear on personal, social, and environmental responsibility? Foremost, Carrie is committed to formal and informal communities of makers, seekers, and learners, as creative agents for transformation, liberation, and flourishing.
Training & Credentials
Theology (M.A., Ph.D)
Fine Arts (B.F.A.)
Restorative Justice / Restorative Practices Certificate
Life Coaching Certificate (ACC and ICF Credential, In Progress)
Spiritual Leadership Coaching Certificate (In Progress)
Retreats (over 20 years experience)
Spiritual Direction (over 20 years experience)
Hypnosis
Hypnosis Practitioner Certificate (In Progress)
Fundamentals of Advanced Ericksonian Hypnotherapy
with Eric Greenleaf, Ph.D.
The Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto
Palo Alto CA
2013 - 2014
The Work that Reconnects (with Joanna Macy, et al)
Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
Gifts Discernment / Dependable Strengths Certificate