Last night I had the distinct pleasure of being the only person at SOIL’s Third Thursday opening, which meant I had the space, the works, and the artist whose works I wanted to know about all to myself.

The artist was Chauney Peck, whose installation of stained plywood puzzles and one Richard Tuttlesque wall amalgamation with lightbulb is the first one I’ve seen work in SOIL’s cramped backspace. Several months ago, Peck was in a group show at SOIL that included her sculpture of a tent and a handful of drawings, which, all together, I only vaguely remember because the place was so packed when I saw it and the show made no links between the three exhibiting artists, which I found frustrating. But what did stick with me was Peck’s inspiration for the works: an NPR story she heard about a bunch of people covering a Swiss mountain with a blanket.

Peck, who graduated three years ago from Evergreen, is one of those Northwest artists, like Victoria Haven or Leo Saul Berk, whose work is suffused with a transformative, transporting sense of the land. These are Peck’s first plywood puzzles, which are childlike and unusual but don’t stray into whimsy (except the cow, which goes too far for me), and she makes them by taking a scientific story or question, creating a drawing on a sheet of plywood, cutting the pieces out, staining them to make a scene, and reassembling them before they’re hung on the wall. They’re clearly experiments for Peck, and stylistically, a neat foil for her messy, decaying, pitch-perfect Tuttle homage—a series of water balloons, some of which have popped and run down the wall, hanging beneath and “watering” a line of growing green plywood grass, all enclosed in an arched Renaissance-shaped frame made of plywood scraps, some painted baby blue, with a lightbulb positioned above the grass as a false sun. This is pop-inflected, nature-girl Tuttle, and Peck, unlike so many poor imitators, achieves the sort of strange formal majesty that comes with Tuttle’s best works.

The plywood puzzles are sheer charm, and feel like another manifestation of Peck’s idiosyncratic voice, again inspired by oddities in human intervention on the land. One comes from the tale of trees in Alaska that would explode because of rapid changes in temperature due to global warming. In order to prevent the explosions, the landowners put enormous lights on them to keep their temperature stable. That brought the first image here, and I’ve also attached a few others. See the show: it comes down Sept. 3. I’m looking forward to seeing what Peck does next: This feels like a voice that will be worth listening to over time.

(Note: These appear on white walls, not on these black backgrounds.)