COOS BAY — With its many movable wall segments, the Coos Art Museum’s Maggie Karl gallery can be arranged many different ways, usually with a new layout for each exhibit. One way it’s not often seen is without the dividers.

They’re not all gone, but as the gallery is reconfigured for Expressions West 2008, the room looks very big.

“I wanted it to be more open,” director Steven Broocks said, explaining that he asked juror Gary Faigin to choose fewer paintings than the exhibit has typically had so the extra walls wouldn’t be necessary.

The 11th-annual exhibit, which opened last week, includes 64 paintings by 59 artists from 10 western states, which is about 10 percent smaller than the past two years. Eleven South Coast artists are among 27 from Oregon in the exhibit.

Faigin, a Seattle artist, said he looked for paintings that represented a strong point of view with striking visual appeal in making selections from 479 entries by 175 artists. He also chose the award winners, which are purchased by the Southwestern Oregon Community College Foundation in prizes totaling $10,000.

Portland artist Monte Shelton won first place and $5,000 with “Potential/Actualize,” which contrasts two logs labeled “fuel” and “fire” surrounded by what Faigin described as an orbiting of energy spots, “like footprints dancing around a campfire.” The blurry effect of the energy spots makes the painting difficult to render in newsprint, but Faigin praised Shelton for using a stylized color scheme to heighten a mood of tension, “like an explosion the moment before it happens.”

“The painting plays weight against weightlessness, the static against the kinetic, and the transparent against the solid,” Faigin said in an e-mail. “It was an easy choice, an image that pushed beyond the conventional subject matter of many of the other submissions, and making an appealing, original statement about the relationship between matter and energy.”

Shelton explained the painting as “about fueling creative potential to actualize creative passion.”

Winning second place and $3,000 was Brent Adrian of Gilbert, Ariz., with “Octopus and Roasted Duck,” which is based on two close-up photographs of pieces of meat.

“It completely transcended the unappealing subject matter by the repetition of powerful arc shapes, combined with a vivid sense of form and structure,” Faigin said.

Adrian, who works as a medical illustrator, said his portfolio of paintings depicting edible flesh helped him get the job illustrating animal dissections.

The third-place winner of $2,000 was Joseph Guggino of Ellensburg, Wash., with “Skycorner #11.” Guggino won an honorable mention in the exhibit in 2006 with the first painting in the Skycorner series, which looks at modern office buildings from unusual viewpoints.

“These paintings reflect the happenstance of seeing common everyday structures in a new light,” Guggino says in a statement on his Web site. “Compositionally, I crop down the image to express the coming together of dramatic lighting, the ethereal sky, and manmade structure, as a statement itself on mankind’s place in the universe. Do these structures grow up from the ground or do they come down from the sky?”

Among five paintings getting honorable mentions was a self-portrait by North Bend artist Monica Johnson, a 2004 graduate of North Bend High School who won first place in her grade level in the museum’s Vision high school art competition that year.

Johnson, who recently moved back to town after a few years in Portland, said she paints only portraits, but her options have been limited since leaving college.

“I don’t have anybody to paint, so I just paint myself a lot,” Johnson said. “Since I’m not in school anymore, I don’t have access to models. People don’t like to sit for six hours.”

Faigin described Johnson’s “Untitled 3” as “a boldly painted, fresh and friendly encounter with a very direct, almost unsettling gaze … This is someone who very much wants to catch our attention.”

Faigin’s own work is displayed in a companion exhibit, “Reality Check,” in the newly remodeled Mabel Hansen Gallery, which was opened with a ribbon cutting at last week’s reception.

Subtitled “The Uneasy Still Lives of Gary Faigin,” the exhibit uses the tradition of 17th-century Dutch still life painting as a point of departure for works with a distinctly modern sensibility, with serene objects disintegrating into chaos. In “Breakthrough,” the right side of the painting features a table setting above an ocean cliff, but edges are missing from a pitcher on the table, which seems to have exploded, with dozens of little pieces blowing away in the wind on the left side.

The exhibits run through July 5; another exhibit, Kimberly Wurster’s “Images of Nature” continues through June 28.

Admission is $5. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday.