For anyone looking to see a new direction in visual arts, the first stop should be Highland's Uncle Freddy's Gallery, in the eyes of cofounder, Linda Dorman.

"If somebody hasn't been to an art gallery, I think this is a really nice way to introduce them to different new ways of communication," she said of the current exhibit, appropriately titled "Brave New World."

"For people who haven't come to a gallery before, they'll see three artists who have different styles in art, but their messages seem to sort of overlap."

Running at Uncle Freddy's through Oct. 25, Dorman and fellow gallery cofounder Tom Torluemke called upon a trio of contemporary artists from far beyond the region to give both newcomers to the art world and Northwest Indiana gallery regulars a look at who Dorman refers to as "fresh visionaries."

Casey Roberts, based in Indianapolis, has exhibited his landscape and nature paintings throughout Indiana as well as in Chicago and Louisville and was a recipient of a grant from the Central Indiana Community Foundation's Efroymson Family Fund.

Los Angeles-based artist Brian O'Dell was reared in Lansing and studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago before making his way to the California Institute of the Arts. His tiny, science fiction-inspired creations have adorned Uncle Freddy's walls on several occasions in the past, and his works also have been seen in galleries and museums throughout Illinois, California and Texas.

"World" also marks the first time Uncle Freddy's has exhibited works of Parisian artist Julien Colombier, who has used walls and trains around his homeland as canvases for his paintings and whose large-scale installation pieces have been on display at galleries and museums from Belgium to San Diego.

After more than a half decade of curating exhibits at Uncle Freddy's, Dorman was admittedly amazed at the pieces she had on hand to display.

"(The pieces in the exhibit) have similar themes, dealing with man and nature and science and nature and things like that," she said.

"Once we had all of the work here, we were like 'wow. This is really going to work well together.' We knew right away that the show was really going to look great with what we had, and we weren't going to have to sort of micromanage what they sent."

Additionally, all of the 16 works on display at "World" are available for purchase, with prices ranging from $525 to $5,000.