In the upper right corner of one of the works featured in “No Name That I Know Of,” the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture’s new exhibition of paintings by Bellingham-based artist Andrea Joyce Heimer, you can spot a crying figure perched on a fence as night falls behind her.

Following that figure’s trail of tears down the canvas will lead your eye past scavenging dogs and rodeo rings, overflowing trash barrels and a supine cowboy surrounded by empty beer cans, until, finally, you arrive at the striated pinks and purples of a Montana sunrise.

The collage-like color and activity of this roughly 7-by-8-foot painting are entrancing in their own right, but the scene is also noteworthy because it contains so many of the hallmarks of Heimer’s work.

For one, it’s not bound to traditional perspective from a single vantage, offering instead a panoptic, memory-fueled vignette. Different points in time and points of view all inhabit the same space.

For another, the painting’s full title, abridged to “When I Was 12 Or So I Went To The Rodeo,” is a breathless, 63-word description that helps the viewer contextualize what’s being depicted. Many of Heimer’s works actually originate from those descriptions and are therefore inseparable from them — despite the risk of the stream-of-consciousness titles becoming more of a talking point than the images themselves.

And then, less conspicuously, there are what Heimer calls “witnesses” or “observers.” In this particular painting, they take the form of a line of cowboys. Tellingly, these so-called observers are oblivious to the preteen girl at the periphery, who sobbed for hours after having been stood up. Their oversized index fingers are all directed at the central cattle roping.

A few days prior to the opening of “No Name That I Know Of,” Heimer stops in front of “When I Was 12 Or So I Went To The Rodeo” and explains how it represents her processes and preoccupations.

“Even though I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, I try really hard to tether myself to jobs or people or places. It’s this kind of intentional way of temporarily attaching myself to someone or something.”

“I typically work around a central theme. Usually something depressing,” she says with a good-natured laugh.

“All of this is kind of related to my adoption and not feeling like I ever really belonged somewhere. And really struggling with this feeling of being disconnected from people, from places. I know everybody feels like that once in a while, but to me it’s almost like it’s pathological.”

As a result, ever since she began following this artistic trajectory a little over 10 years ago, Heimer’s paintings have tended to be cathartic variations on that theme. They’re a way for her to work through the messier, rawer parts of her autobiography.

“A few of them are a little more existential, but a lot of them are rooted in actual experiences, actual places, actual people,” she says.

That’s how she arrived at works like “I Have Always Wanted To Swim With Everyone Else” (the start of a longer 138-word title), a painting that shows nude figures frolicking in a network of flattened rivers and waterfalls. They’re heading toward idyllic pools filled with fish, who are the natural stewards of what Heimer describes as an “unknowable knowledge.” The fish act as the observers in this scene.

Heimer’s expressions of alienation and otherness have shades of light, too. Across the room, she revisits the same idea in “The Best Time For Fish To Bite In The Bitterroot,” where you can see her avatar wading in shallow water as the fish nibble at her feet.

“This is a happy one,” she says. “It was this really fleeting, tiny moment where I’m connected to this place. It was this really beautiful feeling — just for a split second. And so I really wanted to paint that.”

Cut off by the upper border, an Edenic rainbow arcs above the raindrops and dark clouds. And, as in most of her paintings, there are also subtle flashes of humor. The cream-colored patches on the pink bodies? Those are tan lines. Lurking in other works you might see a urinating cowboy or, like in “A Girl Who Sat Next To Me In School,” a daring horse rescue where the animal-loving heroes fire their pistols upwards so as not to hurt the marauding wolves.

The distinctive figures in Heimer’s paintings, often presented in a planar side profile, are reminiscent of Indigenous or early Greek or Egyptian art. She attributes her style to the fact that she was largely self-taught and didn’t pursue her MFA until she had already begun to find her visual voice.

“I grew up in Great Falls, Montana, and some of the very first art that we were shown in kindergarten was ledger drawings. I remember looking at those ledger drawings and seeing that they were very flat and told these really heartbreaking stories, and I just really connected with them as a little kid.”

Although they’re drawn from different phases of Heimer’s recent work by MAC curator Anne-Claire Mitchell, the 15 pieces in “No Name That I Know Of” — including three brand new landscapes — have a through-line of what Heimer calls “tethering” herself.

“Even though I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, I try really hard to tether myself to jobs or people or places. It’s this kind of intentional way of temporarily attaching myself to someone or something,” she says.

“Most of the paintings in here are either speaking to that moment of trying to tether or being tethered. Or the total opposite: looking for a tether and there’s none to be found.” ♦

Andrea Joyce Heimer: No Name That I Know Of • Through May 25; open Tue-Sun 10 am-5 pm • $9-$15 • Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture • 2316 W. First Ave. • northwestmuseum.org • 509-456-3931