Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

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.

Local artist Hayley Barker's first show at the Charles A. Hartman Fine Art Gallerywas two years ago when she showcased "Chimeras," a series of paintings very well received by local publications. Today, she's back at the gallery presenting "Cathedrals," a new series of illuminating and beautifully ethereal works inspired by sites in the young poet Opal Whiteley's diary.

For Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, his lifelong habit of wandering and looking began as a child. His family relocated frequently and, after each move, he would steal off by himself to explore his new neighborhood, rapt by the sense of profound discovery he found so close to home.

Within the series are many of Arnold’s signature motifs: waves so wide and jagged, they look like mountains (The North Sea, Netherlands); crew members posing with fearsome sea creatures with glistening, gaping mouths (Willy and the Monkfish, North Sea, Scotland); and ravishing still lifes such as Beamer Catch, North Sea, Netherlands. That photo, with its spiny, big-lipped pink and brown fish lying on deck, soon to die in holding bins, is a visual orgy of detail: bubbles and blood, crabs and starfish, a Monet-like pastel tableau of gorgeous, impending doom. This hits upon the Freudian undertones in Arnold’s best work. The artist has a knack for transmuting photojournalism into metaphor.

Like all artists accorded the adjective “iconic,” Adams (1902-1984) is easy to view through a musty, sepia-tinted monocle—a trend that Ansel Adams: Photographs 1920s-1960s does much to dispel. Crisply matted and framed in immaculate white, the prints incorporate close-up and medium-shot imagery, not just the expansive vistas that made Adams famous. Even those wide panoramas—witness the transcendent Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park—come across in a different light.