Rice dryers and silos of the Sacramento Valley serve as subjects in Ema Lahey’s “RICELAND & beyond.” Lahey developed the exhibition from about 700 photographs taken during visits to Glenn and Colusa counties in the winter of 2025 and 2026. The exhibition opens Sept. 5 at the Colusa County Arts Council Gallery. Photo courtesy Colusa County Arts Council

COLUSA, CA (MPG) - Forty years after leaving California, artist Ema Lahey returned to the Sacramento Valley and began looking again at a landscape she had known since childhood.

During five visits to Glenn and Colusa counties in the winter of 2025 and 2026, Lahey took about 700 photographs of rice dryers, grain silos, fields, irrigation canals and the surrounding landscape. Those photographs became the inspiration for "RICELAND & beyond," her first solo exhibition.

The Colusa County Arts Council will open the exhibition with a public reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 5 at its gallery, 151 Fifth St. in Colusa. The paintings and collage works will remain on display through Dec. 10.

Lahey grew up in Willows, where her childhood included roaming irrigation canals, picking oranges as a seasonal worker and team-roping with her father on the family's small cattle ranch.

Her career later took her to New York City, Denver and Cleveland. She returned to rural Northern California in 2022 and established Sönam Studio in Lake County.

Her work has included dance, graphic design, book design, collage, artist's books and sacred art painting. With "RICELAND & beyond," Lahey returned to the agricultural landscape that surrounded her while growing up.

Artist Ema Lahey will present “RICELAND & beyond,” her first solo exhibition, at the Colusa County Arts Council Gallery beginning Sept. 5. Lahey grew up in Willows and returned to Northern California in 2022 after four decades away. Photo courtesy Colusa County Arts Council

The exhibition focuses on structures and scenes that remain part of everyday life throughout Colusa County and the Sacramento Valley.

"Ema Lahey has captured something that is deeply familiar to all of us who live here, yet is so easy to overlook," Colusa County Arts Council Director Milly Lee said.

Lee added that the exhibition offers another way to view places people may pass every day.

"It is easy to simply drive past the rice mills, silos, fields, and farmland on our everyday commutes and forget the natural beauty that our rural area actually holds," Lee said. "Ema's work allows us to pause and celebrate what our county is best known for, which is our agricultural landscape, our rice industry, our wide-open skies, and what so many of us take for granted or simply forget to see."

In her paintings, Lahey draws connections between the Sacramento Valley landscape and places she encountered during her years away from Northern California. Rice dryers and silos take on a scale she compares with Manhattan skyscrapers and the Colorado Rockies. Views of rice checks and fallow fields resemble city blocks viewed from above.

Water, changing light and shadows also appear throughout the work, reflecting the agricultural cycle that shapes the region.

"Her paintings invite us to look again at the place we call home," Lee said.

For Lahey, that second look comes after decades away from the landscape that helped shape her early life and later her work as an artist.

"Only the rice itself is more miraculous," Lahey writes in her exhibition statement.

The opening reception for "RICELAND & beyond" will run from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 5 at the Colusa County Arts Council Gallery, 151 Fifth St., Colusa. The exhibition will remain on display through Dec. 10.