Friends of PLAYA
A multi-disciplinary group exhibition

In 2024 one of the Punch founding members spent a month at PLAYA, an artist retreat Center in south-central Oregon, discovering the wonders of this magical windswept landscape. Creating new work and forging new friendships, a return visit in 2025 sparked the idea to share works by friends both new and old who share in the experience of this place.

Situated on the northwest edge of the great basin near Summer Lake, Oregon, PLAYA offers residency opportunities and a range of educational and outreach activities in the arts, literature, natural sciences, and other fields of creative inquiry. Additionally, this facility offers attendees the gift of time and space for personal growth, reflection and a creative reboot in an environment that is ripe with solace, isolation and a rugged sense of expansiveness. As a nonprofit organization, its mission is to support positive change for our world and environment.

Exhibiting Artists

Renee Adams is an artist, curator and founding member of Punch Gallery. Her mixed media sculptures explore the complex relationships humans have developed with the natural world. Most recently she has been tapping into her German heritage and s new- found love for blacksmithing through the creation of Art Nouveau-inspired works.

T (Taneum) Bambrick is an award-winning American poet and writer known for work that explores environmental degradation, labor, and the complexities of human intimacy. Currently based in Los Angeles, they are a Dornsife Fellow in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Southern California.

Jerri Bartholomew is a research scientist and a glass artist. Her artwork searches for the intersection between the two disciplines and how they inform each other. Her topics often focus on ecology and the microbial world. She combines photographic screen printing and a variety of fusing, casting and cold-working techniques to create complex imagery that reflects the natural world.

Khaila Batts is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores memory, perception, and the complexities of Black identity through painting, and digital collage. Blending analog and digital processes, she creates layered, surreal compositions that challenge traditional representations of the body and narrative. Her practice often incorporates archival imagery and audience interaction to deepen engagement with her work.

Cynthia Camlin interprets minute details of living environments beneath our feet with repetition and pattern. In one series of oil and distemper paintings she recreates the intricate surface of peat bogs. This work is part of her ongoing practice informed by climate change and the entanglement of social and environmental histories.

Eunsun Choi is a multidisciplinary artist born in Korea and based in Seattle. Her work seeks to understand the genetic evolution required for humans to overcome harsh environmental challenges. She creates hypersensitive organic-shaped kinetic sculptures that react to artificial stimuli, mirroring human vulnerabilities in response to natural influences.

Renee Couture’s current focal point is motherhood. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing. Couture has taught Fine Art for over a decade at Umpqua Community College and currently works as a Project Manager with the Percent for Art/Art in Public Places program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.

Justin Gibbens is an illustrator and painter who blends traditional Chinese fine-line techniques with stylized, natural science-based imagery. He is a founding member PUNCH.

Marne Lucas is an interdisciplinary artist and end of life doula (EOLD) working at the intersection of art, science, and health, using conceptual overlaps: life’s energy, the body, and mortality, in social practice investigations. Lucas’ long-term projects are informed by the community around her and inspired by death doula movements. The Bardo Project explores creativity as a form of spiritual care in collaborations with terminally ill artists nationwide to establish their legacy.

Katie Miller was born and raised in the wilderness of Northeastern Minnesota but is now deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest. Her multi-disciplinary practice explores the interplay of wilderness and human infrastructure, reflecting on how we shape, and are shaped, by the places we inhabit.

Melissa Desmond Mohammadi is an artist living and working in Oakley, California. Her work grows from a lifelong devotion to the natural world. Drawing and painting are forms of listening that allow her a way of entering into quiet dialogue with plants, shells, fossils, and other beings, allowing an intuitive pull toward line, color, and pattern. This slow, attentive process is rooted in the belief that nonhuman life carries its own agency, memory, and wisdom.

Stephen Montalvo is an active composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music, as well as audiovisual installation artist based in New Orleans, LA. He works to make new music accessible to wider audiences, creates playful and interactive installations, and occasionally jumps on stage with a punk rock percussion ensemble. Through his works, he explores concepts related to resonance and rhythmic interplay, works to promote equity in artistic experiences, and draws inspiration from social, ecological, and political concerns.

Mychelle Moritz is an interdisciplinary artist working from a base of clay. Drawing from observations, lived experiences, and fiction, her art is focused on environmental and social justice. Mychelle lives in Portland, Oregon where in addition to her artistic practice she also works as a therapist.

Adrien Segal’s work draws from history, culture, landscape, emotion, and perception in order to synthesize information into knowledge through an intently emotive human experience. She interprets the poetics of place, translates changes in the landscape into lines, forms, and materials to reveal unseen phenomena. Her work is intended to join personal meaning with sensory experience and to connect people across space and time by giving invisible forces a physical presence. Adrien is based in Oakland, CA.

Liz Tran is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Pacific Northwest, working between Seattle, Oregon's Willamette Valley and wherever else her work takes her. Tran’s work draws inspiration from dreams, the natural world, outer space, and the human psyche, reimagining natural forms through vibrant, synthetic hues that serve as a joyful antidote to the mundane. While painting is central to her practice, she embraces a wide range of creative mediums, including sculpture, large-scale installations, projection mapping, art direction for music videos, and fashion collaborations.

Scott Trimble is a Seattle based artist who creates sculptures that can be intimate, interactive, site-responsive, and public facing. His artworks refer to the repetition and fluidity found in nature, straddle the worlds between art and architecture, and exhibits in alternative venues least expected.

Matthew Williams (they or she) is a Baltimore-based performing artist, somatic facilitator, and lifelong student of the body. Their performance practice is inspired by the human body as a site for choice, liberation, and a means to be in relationship with place and community across differences. Matthew is engaged with Western Somatics, contact improvisation, voice work, and the study of functional anatomy.

Upcoming Events on the PUNCH Stage

5/02: Ken Waldman & The Wild Ones
(spoken word + old-time fiddling)

5/09: The Wayside
(alt-country/americana)

5/16: Tyler Berd
(indie-folk + storytelling)

5/23:  Generifus
(indie-folk)

5/30: The Canyoneros
(classic country)