It's that time of year again. Time to celebrate the holidays with friends and family but, for many, it can also be a time of doubt and frenzy. How do you find the perfect unique gift for your loved ones at a price that makes sense? Bohemia Gallery is pleased to offer a solution--the gift of affordable, one-of-a-kind original works of art that won't break your budget.

December's exhibit is The Return of the Mini Show featuring bite-sized works by a host of celebrated local and Oregon artists including Anahata Katkin, Ann DiSalvo, Cantrell Maryott, Cary Lathan Weigand, Flora Bowley, Holly Kilpatrick, Kaycee Anseth-Townsend, Lara Hackbarth, Leah Fanning Mebane, and a very special preview of upcoming featured New York City artist, Sabine Friesicke's work. There are distinct mediums for every taste, meant to be given and cherished.

Anahata Katkin



''I don't know why cutting things apart to reassemble them has made the world right side up for me-but at times it literally has done just that,'' says Anahata Katkin, founder of PaPaYa! ''I try very hard to create artwork for myself and nothing more," she says, ''and when I succeed in getting out of my own way, I share it with the rest of the world.'' Her instantly recognizable collages are a marriage of antique ephemera and Asian traditions. Her cards, stationary, and other gift items can be found in thousands of retail locations and in seven countries around the world.

Leah Fanning Mebane

Leah Fanning Mebane spent her childhood in the artistically diverse city of New Orleans. She was exposed to dance, art, and writing from an early age and was inspired by her artist/writer father. After high school, she became a professional ballet dancer and for five years danced throughout the East Coast with a variety of dance companies, including the Charleston Ballet Theater and the Maryland Ballet Theater. During this time her passion for painting continued to grow as she began her portraiture/mural business and continued her art training at several universities. She now lives in the Applegate Valley and teaches private painting lessons in her studio at the Briscoe Art Wing in Ashland.

Kaycee Anseth-Townsend

Kaycee Anseth-Townsend describes herself as "a soul-searching, dog-walking, Airstream-living, fire-spinning artist who believes that collage is art's answer to the green movement." She cuts and pastes leftover magazines and books into complex patterns and narratives, creating vignettes that explore myth, fairytale, and patterns of human behavior. Kaycee lives and works in central Oregon.

Sabine Friesicke

"If you are looking outside yourself for answers, or for some intrinsic meaning about what Friesicke is endeavoring to say in her work, you will be looking for a long time.

Friesicke's work is internal; it is about the self within, that quality of Being we all possess, but except for what are usually reserved for moments of extreme mental and/or emotional lucidity escape our daily experience of being fully present." -Marc Strauch

The Return of the Mini Show runs through January. There will be an artist reception during the First Friday Artwalk on December 4th. Live music by Flat Five String Band, a sneak preview of Dancing People Company's upcoming Winter Solstice performance Call Back The Sun, as well as wine by Liquid Assets.

For more information visit www.bohemiagallery.com or call 488-5227

Cate Strom was born into a family of writers, musicians and painters.  Her artistic talents appeared at a very early age.  ''I don’t remember a time I didn’t have crayons in my hand,'' she says.  Cate was raised in France by her mother, spending her formative years living in Paris, the French countryside and on the Riviera.  She was deeply inspired by the art and history there but it was a trip to Italy while in her early twenties  that changed her life forever.  ''Being in Florence was the first artistic awakening I had ever experienced,'' Cate says.  ''I had lived in France and seen many beautiful things there but nothing like what I saw in Florence.''  Moved by the richness of the architecture, Cate followed her calling and moved to Boston to pursue her studies at the Massachusetts College of Art.  Her travels to India, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Italy, France and Jerusalem continue to inspire much of the poetic, architectural, historical and spiritual imagery infused in her compelling mixed-media works.

Cary Lathan Weigand earned both BFA and MFA from the University of Hawaii.  In  2006 she received a grant award from The George Sugarman Foundation and has been featured on Oregon Art Beat and published in Ceramics Technical.  Influenced by an oceanic divide of east and west, Cary says her story is a marriage between the mass of clay and the brush stroke of paint.  ''Ceramics remind me of the fragility of life,'' she says. ''These figures come alive for me, they hold stories, and they resurrect life into the inanimate object.''

Bohemia Gallery co-owner Inger Jorgensen says that art is ''the thread that weaves my life together.''  A prolific painter, Inger has been gaining international notoriety and was recently selected to travel to the Netherlands for Schildersweek, a worldwide painters workshop that chooses only a select group of artists from around the world to participate.  "It helped me to gain insight into my deepest passion as an artist,'' she says of the conference which culminated in a meeting with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende.

Windows and Wings runs through September. There will be an artist reception during the First Friday Artwalk on September 4th as well as a performance by legendary guitarist Jeff Pevar and wine by Liquid Assets.