Caldera hosts variety of artists

"When you come onto this landscape, you have a feeling that anything is possible," Caldera Executive Director Tricia Snell said.

The setting was a presentation marking the culmination of one month's work from the March artists in residence at Caldera, the arts center at Blue Lake, west of Sisters.

"You clear away some of the static in your life and focus on something that is much more creative and much more hopeful."

March's group of artists consisted of a filmographer/sculptor/artist, a visual artist, a photographer, two dancers, and another filmographer.

Each of the artists presented their unique view of the world around us.

"The creativity of the artists, where they are going. How exciting it is to see a whole new dimension," said retired teacher Barbara Bett, who came down with a group of people from Portland.

Heather Watkins, a Portland visual artist, presented ink on paper in a new light. A unique aspect of her work was the way she created her piece. She poured ink onto paper and moved the paper. She created several pieces of black ink on black paper and of black ink on various textures of white paper. She is attracted to forces in nature that aren't fixed, that create volatile or unstable emotion.

"I like to get the ink to make a drawing without using drawing instruments," she said.

"Since being here, I've become more aware of how I want my day to be shaped around my art," Watkins commented.

Photographer Jin Lee, of Chicago, describes her process as being immersed in her work. Visiting a site and shooting photographs over and over for a period of time helps her get to know the place where she lives.

Lee brought three bodies of her work with her to plan how she was going to organize them for her book. She likes focusing on a sense of place, and a sense of time.

Her first project, which she has worked on for three years, tells a story about the diminishing landscape of prairies in America.

Lee also presented a series of photographs of trash she found in her own neighborhood.

"The pictures are not meant to be an anti-trash campaign," Lee said. "There is meant to be both beauty and sadness to them and they're very much about people's lives. It's a still life of a moment."

"The trash, there's a strange beauty to it that comes through in your photography in a way that I wouldn't expect," a guest commented.

Two separate filmographers presented footage of their work. Vanessa Renwick showed a film she had done about the House of Sound Record Store in Portland. The film's gray colors emphasized the stark landscape after the business and other buildings in the neighborhood were torn down.

Filmographer and sculptor Krista Caballero, from California, presented a film out of which she also created sculpture and an installation. The film focused on an oil spill which had been going on for 38 years, located in the Guadalupe desert. Out of this project she created a studio installation of rows of test tubes filled with polluted sand, and sculptures of surveyors leveling

rods.

"I wanted to bring contamination into the pristine gallery space to emphasize the idea I was trying to

create," Caballero said.

Dancers and choreographers Cara Spooner and Alicia Grant, from Toronto, performed a dance routine. After days of diagramming moves on paper, they responded to music by tumbling, stretching, even running in the large expanse of Caldera's main hall.

Every year more and more people apply for the residency program.

"What happens here travels out into the world in the form of books, films, and various art forms," Snell said.