COASTAL OREGON ARTIST RESIDENCY

Former COAR Participants

2022: Bill Atwood, Kate Speranza

2019: Drea Rose Frost, Jeremy Furnish

2018: Cara Mico,  Stephen Shumaker, Wenda Vorce

2017: Bonny Gorsuch

2016: Dawn Stetzel, Sean Barrow

Award Winners 2019

Jeremy Furnish & Drea Rose Frost

Jeremy Furnish

Jeremy Furnish, born and raised in Portland, is a multi-medium visual artist and designer currently living and working in the Columbia River Estuary of Northwest Oregon. Jeremy began his creative stride as a child, “coloring outside of the lines and finger-painting the dog.”  Furnish used his residency to create a body of work with a goal of making a connection between the collection of refuse and the viewer. “Throughout my days, I keep a watchful eye for the next adventure and opportunity to create something from what others have refused,” Furnish wrote in his essay. “I continue to investigate origins, study process, perfect technique, and keep in my mind that a new body of found object works is just one adventure away.”

Post the residency Jeremy created the Astoria Regatta 125 Commemorative Public Sculpture.

Drea Rose Frost

Cannon Beach resident Drea Rose Frost is an artist whose conceptual work revolves around the ocean landscape, passing time, repeat patterns in nature, and our human relationship to the planet. During her COAR residency, Frost developed a new series of acrylic paintings, a series of sculptural assemblages, and a series of gyotoku prints on rice paper using found objects to form the shape of a fish. “By integrating man-made debris,” Frost wrote in her application essay, “I hope to carry the message about how much we consume and throw away, to the peril of the planet and ourselves.”

“My goal with this project,” she wrote, “is to create an exhibition that encourages community dialogue about our responsibilities as ambassadors and protectors of our coastline and the earth; hopefully resulting in a better awareness of our habitat and realization that its possible to make small life changes that reflect positive environmental values. I am also hoping to show through my artwork that various materials can be transformed from detritus into something beautiful with the goal of convincing people to view such objects in a different light and perhaps give them new life beyond ‘trash.’”