Faculty Exhibition at EOU’s Nightingale Gallery, exhibit opens January 10, 2025

Faculty Exhibition at EOU’s Nightingale Gallery, exhibit opens January 10, 2025

LA GRANDE, Ore. – A presentation of recent works by Eastern Oregon University’s Art Department faculty will take place Jan. 10 through Feb. 7 in the university’s Nightingale Gallery. The biennial “Faculty Exhibition” provides viewers a glimpse into the artists’ varied studio practices. The exhibit opens with a reception and gallery talk by the artists on Friday, Jan. 10 from 5-7pm.

This exhibit is a showcase for the wide array of studio work created by the faculty teaching in the university’s Art program. On view will be a collection of works by professors Susan Murrell, Cory Peeke, Nathan Prouty, Michael Sell, and Heather Tomlinson. The exhibit and gallery talk will give viewers significant insight into the most recent studio practices of the five artists.

Susan Murrell will be presenting the installation “Flowstone.” The work was created collaboratively with Portland artist Hannah Newman and explores the end of day as it relates to the end of days. 

Murrell says of the work, “Sunsets, depicted as solitary figures, propagate into a forest or family of stalagmites. The sunset in Flowstone is depicted in multiple ways – as a sculptural figure embedded with sediment, a flat movie-poster double, a cast shadow, and the absence of the form itself. Whether the light show cues a romantic conclusion to the hero’s journey or a pause in the everyday, sunsets hold the promise of endless repetition while evoking nostalgia, beauty, melancholy, and hope.”

Cory Peeke will exhibit a selection of mixed media collage/drawings. His works employ the use of a variety of adhesive tapes, charcoal and found images to explore aspects of memory and anxiety. 

Peeke states “My work is a study in anxiety and control, impermanence and obscurity.  They are manifestations of my relationship to the imprecision of memory. The memories that we hold on to and the memories that hold on to us.”

Explorations focused on plenty and excess through the lenses of signs and symbols, transparency, and the formal qualities of the cylinder and the jar as delivery strategies are the motivation for Nathan Prouty’s recent studio practice.

“I am captivated by the paradox of abundance—how excess simultaneously invites and overwhelms, concealing nuance beneath its surface,” says Prouty. “Ultimately, my practice reflects the absurdity and complexity of modern life, where the ordinary and the profound collide in unexpected ways.”

Michael Sell’s current photographs are part of his diaristic approach to making art while contributing to the vernacular image feed in which nearly all of us participate. Creating portraits or documenting pickup cricket matches, his work explores the dichotomous relationships between ambiguity and narrative, clarity and obscurity, and vitality and mortality.

The natural beauty of abstract forms and colors found in nature serve as inspiration for Heather Tomlinson’s tufted fiber artwork. This magnified, nature-based inspiration is then transformed by current events, emotions (cue anxiety) and tensions in the living of life day-to-day.

“These disparate bodies of work come together to expose not only the dynamic complexity and diversity of the artists working at EOU but also allow the audience and ourselves to make connections between the works and the concepts that each of us explores,” says Cory Peeke, Director of the Nightingale Gallery.

See the exhibit through Friday, February 7, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. The gallery talk by the artists and reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 10. 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 artists please contact Gallery Director Cory Peeke at cpeeke@eou.edu.