((L-R, T-B) Rainbow Trout by Gary Wing, Owls by Becky Bremer, Spring Fling by Julie Miller, Owl and The Man in the Moon by Kathleen Peet, Happy Valley by Beth Hanson, Spring Flowers by Kolbie Moore, Sista by Linda Kanable, Mount Washington at Black Butte Stables by Terry Stanley)
Now open at the Dry Canyon Community Arts Center, the all- community show gathers work by 86 artists from Jefferson, Crook, and Deschutes counties. For eight weeks, visitors can enjoy both two-and three-dimensional art, created by award-winning artists and young people still discovering what their hands and imaginations can accomplish.
Art allows us to enter another person’s way of seeing. An ordinary gourd becomes a boldly carved and painted sculpture. An old, scratched record blooms with wildflowers. Horses run in a rainbow array of colors. When artists share their work, they offer more than beautiful objects: they reveal what they dream about, remember, and love. That exchange becomes especially meaningful when an entire community is invited to share gallery pedestals and walls.
Works that might never meet in a solo exhibition begin speaking to one another in the gallery. Kathleen Peet uses dried hard-shell gourds as three-dimensional canvases, carving and burning their curved surfaces before adding the reds, blacks, blues, and golds of traditional Alaskan-inspired wildlife imagery. Gary Wing, a wildlife biologist, rancher, photographer, and carver, has created a rainbow trout statue that seems to swim above a stream bed of colored stones.
Becky Bremer’s five stately owls stare outward with such solemn intensity that their white heads and necklines suggest a group of nuns boldly posing for a selfie. Nearby, Beth Hanson’s purple-and-green mountains rise over orange foothills beneath a dreamy blue sky, reflecting her interest in memories, relationships, and life’s smaller joys.
Horses also appear through distinctly different sensibilities. Terry Stanley paints four of them chewing hay beneath cloudy skies and towering mountains, while Julie Miller sends a brilliantly colored herd racing through green grass, their purple, blue, and orange manes streaming beneath a red-and-yellow sky.
Other artists transform unexpected materials. High school student Kolbie Moore paints lavender, lupines, daisies, and wildflowers across a Motown record, creating visual tension and echoing the music engraved on vinyl. Linda Kanable shapes clay into a richly patterned woman in a white dress holding abstract yellow flowers — a sculpture that tempts the viewer to lift it, turn it, and feel its textures. Linda Klein reimagines Three Sisters as an intricate mosaic of miniature landscapes, leaves, stones, trees, deer, and setting sunlight.
These works represent only a few voices among dozens. Together, the exhibition reminds us that creativity is not a single talent possessed by a select group. It is a conversation carried across generations, towns, materials, and experience. To walk through the gallery is to see three familiar counties made unfamiliar again through 86 distinct pairs of eyes.