Artist Mary Lou Stebbins splashes the Tioga Hotel with flamingo-pink light in her painting “Coos Bay Waterfront.” Contributed Art

Vote.

The museum’s ballot is a tiny little thing. Just two inches wide, it offers no arguments in favor and none in opposition; projected financial impacts are nonexistent. The ballot for the Coos Art Museum 2008 Biennial Exhibition asks one simple question: which artwork is the best?

Vote. Visit the Museum, stroll the five galleries, allow the art to influence you. Permit the colors and the textures to impact your selection. Breeze by the landscapes, seascapes, portraits and abstracts — make them work to solicit your vote. Study the ceramics and skip the photographs. Or, examine the photography and don’t bother with the glass art.

You are the public and your decision will determine the winner. Vote, and the artist whose work proves most popular will be awarded a solo exhibition at CAM next year.

Since I’ve already slipped my secret ballot into the box, I now can relax and review. The sheer scale of this show — 323 entries — is a mite intimidating. Museum staff have done a first-rate job of mounting and displaying the art, however, so grab a clipboard at the reception desk (ballot handily attached) and follow along as I canvas for votes for my favorites. Brilliant hues and a light touch with her subject bring Sandi Whetzel’s “Wine on the Vine” paintings to a place near the top of my list. She combines acrylic with a co-polymer pour to fashion transparent, glass-like textures on her paintings. The fiery palette of “Wine on the Vine II” fairly pops from the museum wall, while “Wine on the Vine III” sports a cascade of plump grapes, tumbling into a beautifully rendered goblet. No wonder that Whetzel’s work has been used to promote the wine industry of the Umpqua Valley. To this imaginative artist I say, cheers!

Quietly compelling, a series of three prints by Sutherlin artist Susan Rochester offers a true mixed media experience. Rochester, the Fine Arts Director at Umpqua Community College, recently told me in a telephone interview that her “Broken Time” series evolved through a “self assignment — I told myself I could take only what I can see through a window.”

What she took was a series of photographs. What she created was a distinctive and highly original mixed media series, “Closed Door,” “Empty Table,” and “Silent Kitchen.” These studies are photographic images that have been imprinted on fabric, and then suspended from narrow slats of copper-wrapped barn wood. “It’s the barn wood and the copper that make it mixed media,” laughed Rochester when we spoke about her work. She talked about how much she enjoys playing with alternative processes with her photography, and how much she appreciates the 19th-century processes.

“They can’t be reproduced,” she declared. “I really love the 19th-century stuff, I guess it’s my knee-jerk reaction to the perfection in digital media. I like to see the hand of the artist in the work.”

Rochester’s “Broken Time” series features deserted rooms, empty of people, apparently empty of life except for the light. The light is a force, an energy that originates somewhere beyond the printed, fabric panels. And those panels gave Susan Rochester fits, as she practiced and practiced, jamming her printer “six hundred times” before perfecting the process.

“I wanted translucence,” she says of the three prints. “I wanted old fabrics, linen or cotton, and I wanted rolled hems, like old handkerchiefs.” And she wanted the panels to behave like window curtains, to be influenced by people as they pass by. I know that I was influenced — and intrigued.

Fresh and perky, Mary Lou Stebbins’ “Coos Bay Waterfront” is a large acrylic with an optimistic take on what some consider to be a run-down town. A setting sun splashes the Tioga Hotel with flamingo-pink light; busy tugs bob wharf side and brightly colored houses climb the lush, green hills above the bay. With an artist’s easy prerogative, Stebbins has shifted a golden chip pile south, placing it across the road from the venerable, barn-red Coos Bay Iron Works.

It’s a very personal view of Coos Bay, and as wholesome as a piece of apple pie. Like many others in the CAM show, it’s a very American sort of painting, and requires one thing only.

Your vote.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert3@verizon.net.