The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Each winter the Caldera art retreat offers artists a gift: Time and a refuge from the pressures of the world. A place to recharge and create.

And each month Caldera opens public demonstrations of the artists' efforts.

"We get to show off what Caldera is good at," office manager Katie Weinstein said. "We give the gift of time and space to 15 people from all over the world. They are selected by juries."

Caldera also sponsors a youth program, mentoring kids from sixth grade through college. Kids have a mentor, get to live in teepees and see what it's really like to live and work as an artist.

"It's amazing the imagination these artists have," said Jim Patskowski, of Sisters, at last Saturday's demonstration. "And how they express it."

Professional dancer Jessica Burton, of Portland, enjoyed the grand floor space at Caldera.

"At first I just ran around the room," she said. "Then I started choreography."

She noted that the space is a sharp contrast to her usual rented rehearsal studios or her living room.

Burton performed her choreographed dance a cappella without a partner.

Rafael Oses, of Hartford, Connecticut, has been working on a long poem about the Greek mythological character Cassandra, and read from several shorter works.

Wendy Given fascinated everyone with her photographs of halved peanuts magnified to reveal "peanut elves" inside. Trained as a painter, printmaker and sculptor, she eventually found photography and video to be her favorite mediums.

"I'm really interested in the unseen, things you don't typically think about, because they are not there," she said, showing slide after slide of forest scenes she simply calls "The Wilds," each containing several hidden elements.

Jason Porter, a fiction writer from Brooklyn, New York, who has worked for the New York Times and Yahoo news, read a chapter from his book "Why Are You So Sad"? He cleverly applied humor to the topic of depression.

Kevin Cooley, also from Brooklyn, is a photographer and videographer who presented film utilizing his experiments with light and sound showing meteors streaking through trees, a campfire burning on a river, and light effects created using flares.

His work is on display at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

On March 20, a new group of five artists-in-residence will demonstrate their work. Visit http://www.calderaarts.org for more information.