LA GRANDE — A presentation of recent works by Eastern Oregon University’s art department faculty opens Friday, Jan. 10, at EOU’s Nightingale Gallery from 5-7 p.m.

The show continues through Feb. 7.

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.

This exhibit showcases the wide array of studio work created by 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 insight into the most recent studio practices of the five artists.

Murrell will present 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.

“Sunsets, depicted as solitary figures, propagate into a forest or family of stalagmites,” Murrell said. “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.”

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.

“My work is a study in anxiety and control, impermanence and obscurity,” Peeke said. “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.”

Prouty’s recent studio practice “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.”

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

Sell’s current photographs are part of his approach to “making art while contributing to the vernacular image feed in which nearly all of us participate,” according to a press release. 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 Tomlinson’s tufted fiber artwork. This magnified, nature-based inspiration is then transformed by current events, emotions 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 allows the audience and ourselves to make connections between the works and the concepts that each of us explores,” said Peeke, director of the Nightingale Gallery.

View the exhibit Monday through Friday, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., through Feb. 7.

For more information, follow the Nightingale Gallery on Facebook and Instagram.