“Impressions emerge and intertwine in a process of making the work. Dream material, historical influences, things found and lost; all carry traces of human touch and imagination. The art balances between the personal and public; to coalesce into alchemies of place," Deborah Hede.

 

COL is pleased to announce Alchemies of Place, a cross-generational group exhibition opening January 23, 2026. Featuring works by Joan Snyder, Joan Tanner, Terran Last Gun, Gina Werfel, Deborah Hede, Claire Falkenstein, among others, the exhibition explores how artists have used the landscape not as backdrop, but as a vessel for emotion, memory, atmosphere, and transformation.

 

Alchemies of Place traces a pivotal shift in the history of painting: the moment when landscape ceased to function purely as representation and instead became a site of abstraction, metaphor, and subjective experience.

 

From the grandeur of the Hudson River School to the fleeting impressions of plein-air painters, landscape has long served as a means to observe, document, and idealize the natural world. But with the rise of modernism and the accelerating pace of industrialization, artists began to look inward—reflecting not how the world is, but how it feels. The result was a radical re-imagining of the genre: land rendered not through likeness, but through gesture, rhythm, and sensation. This evolution marked a liberation of painting from strict realism and opened the door to personal, political, and spiritual interpretations of place.

 

The artists featured are inheritors of this lineage. Joan Snyder’s work on paper conveys a visceral, embodied response to the natural world, where scrawled marks and color fields suggest terrain, growth, and emotion in equal measure. Joan Tanner’s painterly and sculptural investigations extend this dialogue—transforming industrial and found materials into lyrical, spatial abstractions that reflect both the fragility and persistence of the land as it intersects with human intervention. Claire Falkenstein’s contributions, though not tied to a single medium, reflect her signature integration of form, light, and space—evoking a landscape of movement and transformation through sculptural abstraction.

 

Terran Last Gun, a citizen of the Piikani Nation, draws from Blackfoot visual traditions to abstract the sky, horizon, and sacred geometries of the land. Gina Werfel’s layered, expressive compositions pulse with the vitality of lived and remembered environments, dissolving the boundaries between sensation and scenery. Deborah Hede creates subtle, intuitive works where landscape is evoked through material, pattern, and void—suggesting elements like sky or terrain without naming them outright.

 

Together, their work poses urgent and poetic questions: What remains of a landscape when its physical markers are stripped away? What truths emerge when land is felt rather than seen?

 

As wildfires, drought, and development continue to reshape our environments, Alchemies of Place offers a meditation on loss, resilience, and the deep entanglement between the external world and our internal lives—reminding us that the land lives not only outside us, but within.