Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

Speer is striving to achieve what every artist wants: the unique, the unusual. She wants to push the boundaries of representation, to find a visual language that transcends cliches and the customary. Speer wants to make art that's not just a union between form and content.

I have a theory that artists rarely feel satisfied that they've achieved the unique or the unusual. In most cases, it's the search, the process of getting there that seems important to them.

In Speer's case, right now this process is producing work that ranges from the muddled to the sublime. At times, the worked-over appearance of some pieces offers a metaphor in gift-wrapped form, the very thing Speer does not want to embrace: This is painting about effort and process. There's little to question in terms of Speer's ability or seriousness, however.

What each of these passages accomplishes is a disorientation of the viewer’s perception, a breaking of the fourth wall to reveal that perhaps the great and mighty wizard might just be a little man crouched behind a curtain. That Speer carries this conceit off with supreme panache is a tribute to the seriousness of her intent.  The paintings come across neither as gimmicky nor grandiose, but as earnest entreatments of the viewer to leave all aesthetic presuppositions at the door.

The title of this show says it all: GUN. Each photograph features a gun in a different context. Some of the images are iconic, such as Bob Jackson’s capturing of the moment Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Others are less familiar but no less disturbing—case in point: Elliott Erwitt’s image of a young boy grinning as he holds a toy gun to his temple. The show feels more like a museum exhibition than a gallery show and represents a new level of sophistication in Hartman’s ever-evolving programming.

Some of Sterling's later photos depict distorted spaces. In them, Sterling displays a touch of the Surrealist as architectural buildings and interiors stretch and bend like taffy.

The photos are a counterpoint, to a degree, to Sterling's documentary street photography. But like all of his work, they reveal a photographer who, curious about the world before him, tried to make modest poetry of it through pictures.

But I think Meeks' real subject is about feeling. That's what he's after in this exhibition. And that feeling is of dislocation, loneliness, maybe even bereftness.

Meeks' photographs have a sleepy, fatiguing tone -- of a world right before us in the present but also far away, disappearing, already in the past.

In depictions of sylvan streams and animated skies, Barker conveys a hypersensitive communion with the environment; in the process, she also imparts, with thick impasto and buttery surfaces, an ecstatic sense of the sumptuous materiality of oil paint.

Drawing inspiration from the nearly century-old text, Barker has painted many of the close-to-home places where she finds similar spiritual nourishment. Certainly, the face of Oregon's landscape has been radically transformed -- through clear-cutting and expanding development -- since Whiteley was a child, but Barker's deeply felt paintings remind that our desire to commune with nature remains firmly intact.

The rapturous semi-abstracted landscapes in Hayley Barker's "Cathedrals" could hardly be more distinct from her previous body of work, which depicted whimsical monsters, animal/human hybrids, and indeterminate creepy-crawlies. The current works are inspired by the childhood diaries of Opal Whiteley, an amateur naturalist whose writings abounded with mystical descriptions of the natural world. In oil paintings such as "Grayness (Prodrome)" and "The Sun Shines Yellow (Dazzlement)," Barker alternates passages of luscious impasto with smooth palette-knife work and thin application to create a visual drama well-suited to her neo-Impressionist portrayals of gardens, forests, and dappled light.