LA GRANDE, Ore. – The start of a new academic year at Eastern Oregon University marks the beginning of a new season of exhibitions for the Nightingale Gallery. We are excited to begin our new season of exhibits with “Like the world,” an exhibition featuring the work of Portland artists Teresa Christiansen, Sarah Meadows and Sadie Wechsler. The exhibition of photographic research and reflection explores each artist’s relationship to the natural world. The exhibit opens with a reception for the artists on Friday, October 9, from 5 to 7 p.m.
“Like the world” explores how each artist wrestles with their relationship to the natural world through overlapping and divergent photographic interpretations, offering a complex alternative to the genre of sweeping sublime landscape. In the works of this exhibition, nature appears across contexts and in unexpected ways: sprouting through cracks, emerging from beneath plastic, at the edge of a pavement or in the pages of a gardening book. Each work in the show evades the documentary nature of photography; they are deconstructed and, at times, subsumed into other media: wax, gold leaf, and ceramic structures. Here, depth and physicality bring the fragmented world together.
“These three artists challenge viewers’ preconceived notions of landscape photography through material experimentation and close looking,” said Cory Peeke, Director of the Nightingale Gallery. “They encourage us to make a closer examination of the variety of ways nature surrounds us.”
Teresa Christiansen was born and raised in New York City and lives in Portland, OR, where she is Chair of the Photography Department at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She received her MFA in photographic studies from ICP-Bard and worked as an Assistant Photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has exhibited her work nationally, including New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Portland. In her photographic practice, she cuts, glues, and weaves photos of fragments of her local landscape, then re-photographs them in her studio.
Sarah Meadows received her MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BA from Evergreen State College. Her work has been shown both regionally and nationally at such venues as Melanie Flood Projects (Portland), Filter Photo (Chicago), and ClampArt (NYC). In her studio practice, Meadows explores the non-human world in photographs, drawing from art history, advertising, and personal experience to shape her visual language.
Sadie Wechsler is a photography-based artist engaged with how land asserts its agency, often in peripheral places. She utilizes her background as an arborist and her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest to tell stories of home, highlighting the wild spaces that inhabit the cracks, slopes, and roadsides of the region. Her work can be found in the collections of the Yale University Library, the Hammer Art Museum, the Getty Research Institute, and the Frye Art Museum. In addition to her art practice, Wechsler is an ISA Certified Arborist who supports Portland’s tree canopy through education, pruning, care, and consulting.
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 Wednesday, October 7, at 6 p.m. in Huber Auditorium, Badgley Hall.
“Like the world” will be on view through Friday, November 6. Please note our new gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 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.
