Member’s Spotlight Exhibitions

The Member’s Spotlight Exhibitions at The Contemporary Dayton celebrate the vibrant creativity of our local and regional artist community. Open to all current artist members, this ongoing series offers participants the unique opportunity to present a focused body of work in a solo exhibition curated by Heather Jones, Interim Director and Chief Curator.

Each exhibition is installed in The T. Chase Hale & Jonathan A. Hale Gallery and remains on view for one month, opening with a public reception on the first Wednesday and continuing through the last Saturday of the month. These exhibitions not only highlight the diverse practices and perspectives of our members but also provide a professional platform for artists to gain visibility and engage directly with audiences.

Most artworks are available for purchase, with proceeds supporting both the artist and The Contemporary Dayton’s mission to advance equity, diversity, and access through contemporary art. Participation in the Member Spotlight series is one of the many valuable benefits of being an artist member of The Contemporary Dayton.

On View

Deanna Newsom, Garden Looking East, 2026, mixed media on cradled panel, 10 x 10 inches. $250
Courtesy of the artist

Deanna Newsom: Garden Parallax

September 2-26, 2026
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 6-8 pm

The 2026–2027 Member’s Spotlight Exhibition Series begins with Garden Parallax, an exhibition of paintings by Yellow Springs-based artist Deanna Newsom.

In Garden Parallax, Deanna Newsom explores the natural world through close observation, movement, memory, and the mysteries of everyday landscapes. Working from gardens and other natural environments near her home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Newsom combines acrylic paint, oil pastel, charcoal, soft pastel, ink, and collaged paper to create layered impressions of the places she encounters. Her paintings are less concerned with reproducing a landscape than with capturing the experience of being fully present within it.

Newsom finds refuge in the mysteries of the natural world: the curl of a leaf, the shifting colors beneath ripples on a pond, or the simple marks that can evoke the memory of a walk through a meadow. These small moments of discovery become the starting points for her work. Color, line, texture, contrast, and movement draw her attention, whether in the falling leaves of late autumn or the changing form of a plant observed from one week to the next. Her process begins most often with acrylic paint and ends with loose oil pastel marks, with layers of charcoal, soft pastel, ink, or collaged paper developing in between.

Artist Statement

Parallax is a concept that we encounter every day but might not be able to define: it’s the way an object, when viewed from different locations, appears to shift position relative to its background. It’s the reason that fenceposts whiz past when you’re in a moving car, but the distant mountains stay still.

The five paintings included in this exhibition are the result of an afternoon of parallax in a friend’s springtime garden. The place was a wild mix of pinks and oranges, leaves of all shapes, and stiff stems that seemed to grow thicker as I watched. Sitting in one position, trying to capture this chaos from a single angle, felt, for lack of a better word, lackluster. So, instead, I gather impressions of specific plants and spaces, moving here and there, using soft pastels and inks, without any thought of composition or final product. Back home in the studio, I tore the papers into individual elements – a windblown flower here, a shadowy cluster of grasses there – and recombined them into five separate compositions. Technically each painting depicts a single place in the garden, but in reality each is something different: an amalgam of what I saw and felt from many separate vantage points. To me, this feels like a truer way to experience the natural world.

About The Artist

Deanna Newsom is a mixed media artist whose work depicts the gardens, forests and fields that she encounters in and around her home of Yellow Springs. She works with paints, inks, pastels and collaged paper to create responses to the colors and textures she encounters, often using repeated lines to capture the sense of movement she finds even on the stillest days. She is a lifelong artist who began exhibiting her work in shows throughout the Miami Valley in 2024.

Participating Artists and Dates:

September 2026: Deanna Newsom
October 2026: Elham Bayati
November 2026: Michael Hicks
December 2026: Emery Spina
January, 2027: Jan Heaton
February 2027: Ezra Stinson
March 2027: Judith Huacuja
April 2027: Joey Lotz
May 2027: Rachel Girard Resiert
June 2027: Bil Tipton
July 2027: Olga Evanusa-Rowland
August 2027: Stephen Rumbaugh