With organizational and curatorial muscle from Sandy Brooke and Henry Sayre, Blackfish will showcase professional and contemporary art from Central Oregon in its Portland venue.    

The exhibition East Meets West opening at Blackfish Gallery, on August 2 was the welcome brainchild of Melinda Thorsnes. Thorsnes, knowing that artists living east of the Cascades have fewer opportunities for exhibitions in Portland, proposed that Blackfish Gallery host a showing of works by Eastern Oregon artists.

With organizational and curatorial muscle from Sandy Brooke and Henry Sayre, Blackfish will showcase professional and contemporary art from Central and Eastern Oregon in its Portland venue, providing sixteen Eastern Oregon artists a  chance to play to a fresh audience for the month of August.

The participants represent a broad range of approach and media, from abstract to figurative, from painting to sculptural works: Ryan LaBar, of Joseph, Oregon,  whose ceramic works convey a sense of motion, tension and integration, in white, black or multi-colored clay and glaze; painters Don Gray, Randy Redfield, Sandra Harris, Lorie Baxter, William Hoppe, Shari Dallas, Terry Gloeckler, Sandy Brooke, John Simpkins handily cover the 2-D realm; Frank Janzen with Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts near La Grande, combines photographs, prints, and smoke and sculptors Andrew Wachs, Peter Christian Johnson, Peter Meyer, Tom Dimond and Judd Koehn offer up in-the-round works of steel, glass and ceramics.

The show opens August 2, 5-8pm at Blackfish, 420 NW Ninth St. August 4 is a gallery talk about the work by Henry Sayre, Boyd Harris and Don Gay 1-3pm.