Nightingale Gallery Presents “Unreliable Instruments,” Exploring Perception and Uncertainty

Nightingale Gallery Presents “Unreliable Instruments,” Exploring Perception and Uncertainty

LA GRANDE, Ore. – The Nightingale Gallery of Eastern Oregon University welcomes the new year with “Unreliable Instruments,” a three-person exhibition featuring the work of Jeremy Le Grand, Kyle Peets, and Tom Wixo. The artworks on view invite deep looking, uncertainty, and exploration as a way to navigate the precarity of living in a world shaped by deep fakes and shifting truths. Focusing on the relationships between popular culture, nature, identity, technology, and perception, the exhibition seeks moments of honesty within the symbols and structures we increasingly question. The show opens with a reception for the artists on Friday, January 9, from 5 to 7 p.m.

“Unreliable Instruments” offers an antidote to certainty. It asks viewers to suspend judgment and consider how images construct meaning. Repetition and layering—central strategies for all three artists—defamiliarize what might otherwise seem stable or known. Repetition transforms the familiar into something strange; layering compels closer attention. Together, these approaches create images that vibrate with multiple meanings and emotional resonances. They challenge us to hold multiple truths, timelines, and perspectives at once. While these images may resist easy legibility, they also open new pathways for interpretation. The resulting abstractions complicate our relationship to meaning, to ourselves, and to the natural world as mediated through images. In this context, confusion becomes generative—not a mask that hides, but a veil that reveals what lies beneath.

“These three artists present viewers with a rich array of abstractions that encourage us to look closer and construct meaning from their multi-layered images,” said Cory Peeke, Director of the Nightingale Gallery.

About the Artists

Jeremy Le Grand is a painter based in Portland, Oregon. After attending Portland Community College, he earned his BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. His work often uses patterns and rhythm to build dense, abstract compositions based on fragments of bodies and the natural world. 

Kyle Adam Kalev Peets is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He has presented solo exhibitions at Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR) and Platte Forum Gallery (Denver, CO). His work is included in the Special Collections of the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the archives of MoMA. Peets holds an MFA in Printmaking and a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts from the University of Iowa. He currently teaches Print and Book Arts at Whitman College in Walla Walla.

Tom Wixo is a painter based in Los Angeles, California. He holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville and a BFA in Studio Art from Saint Cloud State University. He has exhibited nationally in both solo and group shows, including at My Pet Ram (New York), Ortega y Gasset (Brooklyn), H Space (Cleveland), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Bond Millen (Richmond), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and Marshall Arts (Memphis).

In conjunction with the exhibition, the three artists will present a public talk about their individual studio practices and the conceptual framework behind the exhibit. The talk will take place on Thursday, January 8, at 6 p.m. in Huber Auditorium, Badgley Hall.

“Ureliable Instruments” will be on view through Friday, February 6. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, follow the Nightingale Gallery on Facebook and Instagram.To request images of artwork for publication or to schedule an interview with the artist, please contact Gallery Director Cory Peeke at cpeeke@eou.edu.