Trees, it seems, are having a moment.

Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory may have had something to do with it, or at least the book was lifted by currents already in popular culture. Two years earlier, the German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees posited that trees literally “talk” to and even “feel” each other through the vast mycelium networks that run beneath them. Since then, it’s seemed that the frequency of news reports about tree and plant intelligence has been ticking up, interviews with biologists saying, “Yes, it’s true.” There is far more to trees than any of us know and maybe even can know.

That unknowability of forested realms is a central theme of a new exhibition at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg, A Walk in the Woods, organized by the center’s Katie Spain and filling the center’s largest space, the Parrish Gallery. It features work by six Yamhill County artists — more than 30 paintings and around 20 sculptural pieces. The show runs through March 13.

You’ll find four singular artistic visions of what it looks and feels like to be in the woods. Among the paintings, Tabby Ivy’s expressionistic works offer a sharp contrast with a more realistic style by Rebecca Kiser. More fantastical are renderings by Elena Markova and her son Trifon, which look vaguely “related” but still have their own visual flavors.

The show also includes sculptures and assemblages by Karin Carter and Linda Workman-Morelli, with the raw materials including stone, wood and clay, sometimes a single medium and sometimes combined, including one that includes branches.

Spain says that the show was inspired by a quote from John Muir: “And into the woods I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

From the show notes:

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“Through a dynamic collection of paintings and sculptures, the artists explore a vast spectrum of woodland experiences — some fantastical and surreal, others haunting or forlorn, and all deeply evocative. The forest, as portrayed in these works, is a liminal space where reality and imagination blur, inviting you to lose yourself in its mysterious allure.”

The word “liminal” does some heavy lifting according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but with regard to wooded realms, it seems the definition that best applies is: “Characterized by being on a boundary or threshold, especially by being transitional or intermediate between two states, situations.”

When you’re in the woods, after all, the “edge” within your field of vision at any point is quite close, depending on the denseness of the trees and foliage. Only a few minutes in any direction can feel like traversing from one unique space to another that is both more of the same and yet wholly different — one reason, perhaps, it’s easy to lose your sense of direction and even get lost.

It’s easy to get lost in Ivy’s dense renderings of woodland, each dominated by one or two colors — yellow in this one, blues and greens in another — in which trees look like remnants of a dream.

Ivy started painting late in life, following a career as a medical technician. She already was interested in photography and started exploring that more. Living in Montana, she found one art class led to another, and watercolors led to oils. As she went along, her style evolved toward one where she painted “more what I was feeling rather than what I was seeing.”

Kiser studied art at Brigham Young University, though for years her creative energy was devoted to family. With her children grown, she returned to painting, and it doesn’t look like she missed a day. She has nine pieces in the show. In most, the sky and play of light are featured prominently, as are trails. There are two, in particular, where the forest looks both comfortingly familiar and yet also ethereal, otherworldly.

The nearly 20 pieces by the mother-and-son Markova team (they work separately, though they share studio space) seem from yet another world. Trifon’s colors are bold, and the trees frequently appear in a wash of foliage and flowers. Animals both real and imaginary populate these realms. He hails from Eastern Europe, and his bio states that “his craft is in his blood, rooted in his great-grandfather’s floral crafts,” producing large pieces “inspired by medieval tapestries, expressionism, and enchanted forests.”

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His mother’s paintings are also of enchanted forests, but her imagery has softer edges, more muted colors — almost a gauzy look. From the notes: “Through layered acrylics, she conjures soft, misty realms, evoking a dreamlike ambiance … where imagination and reality blur like whispers in the morning fog.”

The sculptures balance out the show. Workman-Morelli’s elegant, decorative pit-fired sculptures, the show notes tell us, have been featured in Street of Dreams homes. In contrast, Carter’s veer into the surreal and fantastical, the product of “chasing elusive visions of objects that don’t yet exist.”

It’s a strong start to the new year for the Chehalem Cultural Center, which has doubled its gallery space thanks to the remodeled second floor. The center, at 415 East Sheridan St. in Newberg, is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free.