Collective Visions Art Gallery marks 12 years as a cooperative art gallery in Bremerton, and that’s a good reason for a party. The gallery will celebrate the turning of the calendar 5-8 p.m. Nov. 3.

The gallery opened on Nov. 1, 1994 under the name Washington Avenue Art Gallery. It was located in a building which was torn down to make way for the waterfront convention center, and the gallery moved to its current site on Pacific Avenue.

Collective Visions and the nearby Amy Burnett Gallery constituted the Arts District and began offering monthly First Friday art walks. Other galleries have come and gone, but these two remain as anchors in the downtown arts world.

Collective Visions represents more than 20 artists from around Puget Sound, who takes turns as the monthly featured artist. Their talents cover the artistic spectrum, from pottery and wood carving to painting and mixed media creations.

The gallery also hosts a monthly concert series, with music ranging from jazz to Celtic.

The artist for November is Deanna Pindell, from Port Townsend, with “Mysteries.”

The show features encaustic sculptures and drawings.

In the artist’s words: “Encaustic is an emulsion of beeswax, fused with a torch, to create a beautiful, sensuous surface on an artwork. Invented by the Egyptians … the techniques for working with it are being rediscovered by contemporary artists after two millennia of neglect.”

The title, “Mysteries,” comes from the artist’s desire to understand the “spiritual and philosophical questions of life through the process of creating her artwork.”

Pindell’s friends call her the “Bone Lady,” because she likes to incorporate bone-like structures into her work. She uses real bird bones, ceramic sculptures of bones and abstract forms suggesting skeletons in her pieces.

She has said that the skeleton is the most amazing work of architecture or engineering ever created. Following this interest, she has taught skeletal anatomy and life drawing.

As an artistic medium, beeswax has a translucent quality that creates a captured in time feel, like insects frozen in once-liquid amber. This also lends to the dream-like quality of Pindell’s work.

“Dreams, devotions and desires transmute into tangible form (in my work),” she said.

In creating her two-and three-dimensional pieces she “alchemizes” diverse materials into her poetic forms: PVC pipe is burned, copper wire twisted, delicate drawings are layered transparently, wishbones and ceramic bones and burlap are bound together, and all are coated in the ancient medium of encaustic.

Meet the artist at the First Friday anniversary party. Providing music for the event is 16-year-old cellist Alexandria Allen, also from Port Townsend.

Allen is an award-winning musician and has performed with the Port Angeles Symphony and at the Marrowstone Music Festival.

Collective Visions Art Gallery is located at 331 Pacific Ave., Bremerton.