Postmark Center for the Arts is a rotating gallery space located in Auburn, Washington. The building was built in 1937 and served as Auburn's first post office but since has been converted into a hub for arts and culture. The main floor is dominated by a gallery and gathering space. The original post-office vault has been transformed into an inspiring and unique art installation space, The Vault Gallery. Exhibits rotate quarterly, and focus on providing art from a variety of backgrounds and interpretations.
Please visit our Visitor Information page for more.
Current Exhibition
Discovered Narratives
Marit Berg, Sarah Dillon, Melanie Reed
April 23 - July 3, 2026
The three artists in this exhibition express visual narratives, separate in technique, but sharing space as storytellers and dreamers. Snapshots of memory, surrealist dreamscapes, and symbolic realism create elements of surprise and intrigue, inviting the viewer to interpret their own narratives from each painting and collage. Through the artwork of Marit Berg, Sarah Dillon, and Melanie Reed, this exhibition seeks to compare, and contrast, shared expressions of human experience and stories waiting to be discovered.
About the Artists
Instagram: @maritberg_art
I draw inspiration from 16th-century Dutch vanitas painting, a tradition rooted as far back as Roman times. These works reflect on the fleeting nature of life, using symbolic objects to evoke the passage of time, the futility of materialism, and the certainty of death. I return to these symbols not to dwell on endings, but to follow subtle threads that bind living things to cycles of growth, erosion, and return.
I begin my creative process with drawing, working through a series of ideas where images are rearranged, displaced, and set into landscapes or enclosed spaces. This arcane thought process allows for compositions where perspectives slips, scale shifts, and familiar things become uncertain, as though remembered rather than seen. The result is a visual language built on ambiguity and paradox. Images that resist resolution rather than prescribing meaning. In this tension, I hope to create a quiet unease—a pause—where the viewer lingers, constructs, and unravels their own narrative.
- Marit Berg
Facebook: Sarah Dillon Studio
My work explores memory and change through imagery and the physical act of painting. The surface aggressively develops, pulling at threads of setting, figure and narrative gleaned from family photographs. It ages. The painted surface is aggressively worked in layers off added color only to be scraped away to abstractly reveal painting action from below, obliterating what was present. Fresh mark-making, born anew.
The figure comes in and out as fragmented, abstracted form sometimes clearly in narrative focus and sometimes remanence of color, shape, form, texture responding to broken memory more conceptually. Seasonal change, sense of place and storytelling is deep-set within this series. The places I return to in my memories, the places from my memories that I take my own children to experience and the things I think I have forgotten, coming back to me in in bits and flashes, ultimately exploring what it is to be where I am and how I got here. I encourage self-reflection in life around us in effort to define or question our truth.
- Sarah Dillon
As a Surrealist collage artist, my intention is to discover and showcase the unexpected in new combinations. Selective use of found materials has the potential to both elevate the everyday and inspire a multiplicity of creative connections, and the Surrealist style is ideal for presenting incongruous or mystifying juxtapositions that represent mixed emotions, giving it the potential to offer a wide-ranging variety of social and/or personal narrative commentaries.
It is also my intention to push the collage medium away from whimsicality, randomness and Dada towards a more painterly composition that includes seamlessness, form, line, contrast, and images that contain personal emotional resonance. In doing so, ( also aim to retain the handmade collage technique that reveals both the 'work' of the layering process as well as the 'personality' that comes through the visible hand of the artist.
- Melanie Reed
Opening Reception
An opening reception for Discovered Narratives was held the night of April 23, 2026.
Artists talked about their work to a well-attended crowd of community members.
Programming
Painting with Paper: Integrated Surrealist Collage
with Melanie Reed
June 4, 2026 | 4-7PM
FREE | Ages 16+
No registration required
Visit Postmark Center for the Arts for a FREE workshop with collage artist Melanie Reed! This workshop is designed to investigate the possibility of taking collage-making to a new level, bringing out the best of what it’s best potentially suited for as a medium. We will be taking a close look at source material, story-telling, and composition principles, and examining unique ways to combine disparate imagery for surreal effect. All materials provided.
Story Mask Making
with Sarah Dillon
June 18 and June 25, 2026 | 3-5PM
FREE | Ages 10+
Register here for Story mask making!
Story masks are a wonderful way to release your personality into a piece of art. Not only through the imprint of your own face, but the stories and symbols that help make you who you are. Bring a partner for this activity! Parent and child partners are welcome. Partners will use the art making process as a way to express and share personal or family stories. In this FREE two-session workshop, we will make plaster masks on our own faces, which will help prompt us to share personal stories. All materials provided!
Please plan to register and attend both sessions:
June 18, 3-5PM
June 25, 3-5PM
If you are registered for this activity and are unable to make it, please cancel your registration so those on the waitlist may attend.
Closing Reception
A closing reception for Discovered Narratives is planned for June 25, 2026 from 5-7PM.
View Previous Exhibitions