JANUARY 2025
SOUTH GALLERY
UNTITLED : Portal Series | j.Reto
Photographs by Hans Hallinen
Sketchbooks | Carol Lambert
JANUARY 2025
NORTH GALLERY
Sketchbooks | Carol Lambert
Presented in the North gallery for January, a collection of sketchbooks and drawings from Carol Lambert, curated by Joe and Sally Carr.
Carol was a longtime friend and supporter of the gallery as well as a regular exhibiting artist in our community.
As an accomplished painter and printmaker, Carol fundamentally took an analytic approach to her practice and method of creation. This involved countless hours of drawing and development of concept and ideas.
This exhibition provides insight into a truly unique creative mind, and a wonderful human being.
Photographs by Hans Hallinen
Old and New: Soft, Sweet, Feathered and Furred | Christopher Judd
Christopher Judd, Lion and Lady, graphite on Moleskine paper, 8 x 11.5 inches
JANUARY 2025
CENTER GALLERY
Old and New: Soft, Sweet, Feathered and Furred | Christopher Judd
This show is about animals.
Mostly bears, but mainly animals.
This body of work exemplifies who I’ve become as an artist, both in technique and subject matter. I love whimsy, I love characters, and I love storytelling. All of these drawings have pieces and parts of all three loves, but more than anything they’re a simple exploration of inspiration and imagery recorded the best way I know how.
The following is a collection of graphite drawings that I’ve created off and on over the past five years coupled with some of my work for 2024. It’s a contrast of an evolving style that exemplifies the first time everything clicked for me while drawing.
The drawing Jackal kicked off this long relationship with animals, and it was one of the first drawings that I had ever done that I felt pleasantly surprised by. Detail, feeling, composition, lighting, and style all finally came together into a picture that was the first major success in a medium I had not spent much time on in the 3 years preceding its creation. It was a moment where exploration in other media finally came together in the first material I was drawn towards.
I consider it to be the beginning of whatever mastery I demonstrate when it comes to Graphite drawing. The rest of the show is how things have gone since then.
Instagram @dao_ofdraw
Photographs by Hans Hallinen
Listening to the Quiet | Cheryl Lyon
Cheryl Lyon, Exact Spot, encaustic on wood panel, 12 x 12 inches
OCTOBER 2024
CENTER GALLERY
Listening to the Quiet | Cheryl Lyon
Listening to the quiet is about noticing what I notice when I venture outdoors through the Alaska seasons. Taking in the beautiful complexities before me. Paying attention to the light as it gracefully skips across the water or shines through the clouds. Listening to the wind as it whispers through the trees, and gently moves around my face. As the poet Mary Oliver said about nature, “If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more”. I agree, I long ago embraced, I’m always painting, even when I’m not painting. I’m an observer, an explorer and an eternal student.
Photography by Hans Hallinen
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Alaska: My Take | Elizabeth Pohjola
Elizabeth Pohjola, Sitka Roses, mixed media, 36 x 36 inches
OCTOBER 2024
NORTH GALLERY
Alaska: My Take | Elizabeth Pohjola
A few years ago I walked into a paper store in Seattle and haven’t been the same since. I was seduced. This show of works in collage represents the products of that seduction. The images are based on elements from my homeplace, a place that has mesmerized me with its splendor my whole life. Alaska: My Take. Please enjoy!
Instagram @elizabethpohjola
Photography by Hans Hallinen
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Haiku | Shoko Takahashi
Shoko Takahashi, Against the Wind, 2024, linocut and type
SEPTEMBER 2024
SOUTH GALLERY
Haiku | Shoko Takahashi
This series of relief prints with type stamping is my visual Haiku.
Japanese Haiku focuses on capturing a moment in time, a sense of enlightenment, and images from nature. When I read Japanese haiku, I always feel a sense of calmness and fresh air. I wanted to create the feeling of Haiku by focusing on Alaskan and Japanese animals and keeping the image simple. By integrating text into the design, I created the written haiku feeling in each print.
Instagram @print_wonder
Photo credit: Hans Hallinen
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Inosculation | Kendra Harvey
Kendra Harvey, No Hard Feelings, 2024, ceramic earthenware, underglaze, watercolor, glaze, housepaint on wooden backdrop, 40 x 30 x 11 1/2 inches
SEPTEMBER 2024
CENTER GALLERY
Inosculation | Kendra Harvey
Inosculation investigates the symbolism of interconnectedness, exploring both the double-edged sword which comes with it: support and codependence, enablers and detractors, isolation and community. Using earthenware clay, I depict the organic nature of these connections by sculpting a wide cast of animal figures. These familiar forms, rendered in unfamiliar colors and poses, invite viewers to observe them coil towards and away from each other, narrating the complexities of our shared human experience.
Photo credit: Hans Hallinen
Virtual Exhibition Tour
3 Threads | Mariano Gonzales
AUGUST 2024
3 Threads | Mariano Gonzales
NORTH GALLERY
Talismans
Have you ever had your identity stolen? Your money? Have you ever been hacked or your bank account and identity compromised? I certainly have!
Talismans are supposed to protect the user/wearer from bad luck or calamity. The talismans I have made will (hopefully) protect the wearer from evil stuff that happens in our digital world.
These talismans have wall mounts so that they can function as Art…not just live obscurely in a jewelry box in the bathroom!
WARNING: Should you purchase a talisman and find that it doesn’t protect you, no refunds!
CENTER GALLERY
Killer Drones
Look at the faces of the killer drones. Look at the faces (or bodies) of their victims.
Think about the killer drones’ racism, misogyny, homophobia, love of assault weapons, and hatred for others not like them.
This is the country and world you live in.
Protect yourself and your fellow human beings!
SOUTH GALLERY
Landscapes
I am an artist who has lived in Alaska for 65 years, though I am far from an Alaskan artist!
I am consistently visually fascinated with the beautiful and amazing land mass that is this state.
As well, having driven through every state in this nation (except Vermont and Hawaii) and Canada, I also have memories of the many wondrous landscapes outside of Alaska.
So, I am always exploring alternative media and imagery to create landscapes from memory.
These days, I find that digital tools and media offer the quintessential alternatives!
Photo credit: Hans Hallinen/IGCA
Virtual Exhibition Tour
What Good is Fruit that is not Sweet? | Young Kim
Young Kim, Imported Fruit, archival pigment print
JULY 2024
CENTER GALLERY
What Good is Fruit that is not Sweet? | Young Kim
"What Good is Fruit that is not Sweet?" is a photography project documenting the life of my mother as she ages and confronts changes in her health and mobility. It explores our relationship as parent and child and how roles shift as time persists. These circumstances also pose the questions of whether we can quantify or qualify how good a person is at fulfilling a societal role and whether the romanticization of the “American Dream” can influence those parameters.
These images aim to celebrate daily life with an emphasis on my interpretation of events and with less rigidity around how the events unfolded. This body of work utilizes the indexical nature of photographs to world-build, create and preserve a past that is nostalgic and reminiscent, regardless of whether it is factual.
www.young.kim
Instagram: @theyoungkimosabe
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Behind the Canvas | Samuel Infante Marchan
Samuel Infante Marchan, The Silence of the Girl, oil on canvas
JULY 2024
SOUTH GALLERY
Behind the Canvas | Samuel Infante Marchan
Behind The Canvas is to emerge yourself in a fascinating world of vibrant colors and captivating expressions. Each work becomes an artistic testimony that captures the essence and diversity of the daily experiences of each woman. From warm and passionate tones to fresh and lively tones; we immerse ourselves in each brushstroke that transmits an emotional range and reflects the complexity of female emotions and experiences. These works offer a visual journey through the multiple dimensions of femininity. By exploring this collection, viewers enter a universe of beauty, strength, and vulnerability.
Instagram @samuelmarchan_
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Fieldwork | Owen Tucker
Owen Tucker, Gold 1, collage on paper
MAY 2024
NORTH GALLERY
Fieldwork | Owen Tucker
Fieldwork is a collection of collages made with found materials, colored papers, hand-drawn patterns, and shiny garbage. Aside from focusing on subjects found out in “the field”, the images are geometric explorations of the two-dimensional field.
Virtual Exhibition Tour
How to skip a rock | Jenny Irene Miller
Jenny Irene Miller, Pulling (together), 2023, archival inkjet print, 20 x 16 inches
APRIL 2024
SOUTH GALLERY
How to skip a rock | Jenny Irene Miller
How to skip a rock is a visual poem about relations and the magic found within queerness that is both tender and active. Within these cyclical connections are imagination, admiration, and the sharing of knowledge.
jennyirenemiller.com
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Arctic Phoenix and the Quest for the Sublime | Joshua Demain
Joshua Demain, Play Place (detail), oil on copper, 12 x 18 inches
APRIL 2024
NORTH GALLERY
Arctic Phoenix and the Quest for the Sublime | Joshua Demain
My artwork navigates scenes I encounter from everyday life in Alaska. Ranging from magnificent sunset cityscapes to glorious natural landscapes, these paintings reflect the inherent grandeur of local Alaskan scenery. My goal is to convey the message that beauty is everywhere, and often where we least expect it.
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Guided by Voices | Scott McDonald
Scott McDonald, Love charm (ex-voto) 1, 2024, mixed media on synthetic paper, 11 x 14 inches
APRIL 2024
CENTER GALLERY
Guided by Voices | Scott McDonald
What I do best is keep working and letting things happen. I called this show Guided by Voices because that’s sort of how the process works. I work intuitively and I try not to second guess my intuition. To me, being an artist means working in private and letting things happen–finding surprises, experimenting, showing up, not mediating, not censoring. It also means being vulnerable and presenting what happened.
scottmcdonaldart.com
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Things My Mother Taught Me (How To Have a Good Party) | Jade Ariah
FEBRUARY 2024
NORTH AND SOUTH GALLERIES
Things My Mother Taught Me (How To Have a Good Party) | Jade Ariah
I have always been curious about better understanding my extended family, a large and generally disconnected bunch, many of whom I have photos and faint memories of, but no strong ties. As I've grown and learned more about my family’s history, I can recognize how many of these connections were lost. Domestic violence, substance use, and unresolved trauma play a large part in the lack of connectedness we have towards one another. I’m especially interested in how that shapes the experiences of my grandmothers, mothers and myself.
My sweetest memories are associated with celebrating, cooking and eating. The women in my life are, by and large, the ones who continue to pass down these traditions. Our relationships with food are similarly complicated to our relationships with one another. Everything shared, taught, internalized. Not only how we make food, but how we eat it, how we talk about it and about our bodies. What we shouldn’t eat because we're trying to be “good”. What we make when we’re hosting a party, when we’re struggling to pay the bills, when someone we love is sick. Socialized to provide comfort and tender care for others, often at the expense of showing tenderness towards ourselves.
The process of making this work allows me to reflect on the relationship and stories I have of the women in my life. Using food and everyday objects, this series of work serves as an abstracted matrilineal family tree.
Photos by Hans Hallinen
Paper Quiltmaking Workshop with Jade Ariah | Saturday, February 10th
Thank you so much to the folks that attended Jade's paper quiltmaking workshop - and to Jade for creating this experience for everyone!
Photos by Hans Hallinen
Virtual Exhibition Tour
The Animals Within | Amy Schilling
FEBRUARY 2024
CENTER GALLERY
The Animals Within | Amy Schilling
Within society we are taught that expressing too much of our inner workings is shameful. We must hide all the ugly parts of ourselves in a dark room, paint our faces, and show to everyone we are happy, and healthy. When the darkness comes creeping out, there are hushed tones and changes of the topic. In my experience growing up, there was always this creature hidden in the shadows, not knowing what that feeling is and why it haunts me. Many people grow up also not understanding what lurks inside them. I was told that that's life, suck it up, and carry on despite the pain of this invisible force weighing down, crushing you. For so long mental health issues weren’t taught or discussed. It has put isolating barriers up in relationships with family and friends. After years of walls built up around me, I have torn them down piece by piece. I made myself be raw with my emotions with my loved ones. Through sculpting with ceramics it has allowed me to depict for them how things feel. I have been able to process and come to terms with my own experiences and be better understood by those I care about.
This exhibition documents the struggles and invisible feelings we fight with everyday. I’m able to portray the many aspects of mental illness with animals as subject matter by utilizing their characteristics and animalistic nature that is unique to that species. I silhouette each of these animals in an ornate frame, in order to highlight the beautiful parts of ourselves that we have survived through, almost like a trophy of what we overcome. Through my work I hope to initiate an open discussion about what is considered a taboo topic. Invoking specific emotions that others might not understand, to bring people together to be vulnerable and raw with their struggles, feelings, in order to realize they aren’t alone and it isn’t something to be ashamed about.
Photos by Hans Hallinen
Virtual Exhibition Tour
off and on / Hans Hallinen
DECEMBER 2023
@ the IGCA Annex
off and on / Hans Hallinen
Meditations on light and shadow, and the compression and expansion of space. A collection of objects created with digital manufacturing methods, software, and traditional techniques.
Virtual Exhibition Tour
Stories of Old and New | Yulia Kalagaeva
Yulia Kalagaeva, Yaroslav the Wise: 1031 Year Old Legend, charcoal, 26 x 32 inches
NOVEMBER 2023
SOUTH GALLERY
Stories of Old and New | Yulia Kalagaeva
I’ve always loved stories: the old legends, myths, and histories, as well as the new everyday life experiences and events. I find it fascinating how these stories — some universal, some unique — overlap through our lives to create who we are as individuals. This exhibition is a collection of (mostly) charcoal portraits that depict my perception of a person and the stories within. I like to think of them as extracts of biographical anthologies.
Wunderkammer: Boundaryless Plants | Sandra Talbot
Sandra Talbot, But They Are So Beautiful (Crepis and Leucanthemum), 2023, archival ink printed on metal distressed using steel artifacts collected in the Aleutian Island Archipelago, 21 x 6.5 x 0.2 inches. Imagery is from photographs of metal collected from the site, locale photographs, and digitized field press collections of the invasive Crepis tectorum and Leucanthemum vulgare collected from the abandoned NSGA military site, Adak, Aleutian Islands, Alaska.
NOVEMBER 2023
NORTH GALLERY
Wunderkammer: Boundaryless Plants | Sandra Talbot
To the medieval mind, the Order of Nature was reflected in the ‘typical’ form and function of natural phenomena. Anything rupturing this order—the novel, rare, capricious, uncanny ‘sports,’ monstrous objects brought back from distant lands—filled Wunderkammers (cabinets of curiosities), the precursors of herbaria and natural history collections. These uncanny sports evoked not only a sense of wonder, but collective discomfort, and even terror, as well. Such discomfort, even collective terror, resides in the minds of many contemporary researchers and conservationists when faced with the spreading of alien species into novel environments.
I participated in 20th and 21st century scientific expeditions to remote, treeless, windswept islands of Alaska’s Aleutian Island Archipelago and allied island groups where landfall was made during the Bering Expedition. These islands remain largely uninhabited, yet almost all have endured negative ecological impacts associated with military, cattle ranching, fox farming and other (western) human activities during the 19th and 20th centuries. Following years of research solely on native plant species, during which introduced plants rarely occurred in our vegetation study plots, I noticed the transition of introduced plant species into invasiveness. That is, they have traversed the threshold between ‘introduced’ and a state wherein they expand into and alter a novel environment.
The eradication of invasive plants, difficult even in easily accessible places, is less likely each year as the invasives’ ranges increase on these islands. As such, invasive plant species are liable to continue impacting indigenous plant communities, eventually becoming integral (likely dominant) components of the islands’ vegetation communities. Given a parallel to western colonial expansion into Alaska, these invasive plant species can be viewed as proxies for human expansion and community disruption. Many of the common invasive plant species on these islands—among them, the ox-eye daisy, the dandelion, the bird’s-foot trefoil and several hawksweed species—are characterized by changeable taxonomic nomenclature, morphological variability, and varying ploidy levels. For example, on Simeonof Island, in the Shumagin Island group south of the Alaska Peninsula, the ox-eye daisy is subject to relatively high levels of fasciation (see The Pleasure of Natural Sports). Via morphological variability, hybridization and ploidy, these invasive plant species obscure the boundaries of classical Linnean nomenclature, and via invasiveness breach the ecological boundaries of long-established indigenous plant communities. They are “boundaryless plants.”
This exhibition presents a Wunderkammer of alien, strange, unwelcome and/or unidentifiable (and sometimes beloved) plant species to draw attention to the presence of invasive plant species in far-flung islands of western Alaska. The Wunderkammer includes photographic imagery, including of herbarium specimens collected on the islands, printed on steel plates distressed using iron artifacts also collected on the islands, and cast aluminum or bronze and various artifacts in repurposed commercially-made boxes. Four prints featuring imagery of dandelions include digital imagery generated using artificial intelligence, a technology that increasingly evokes a collective discomfort, even terror, in contemporary minds but also forces us to examine the boundaries of human intelligence and creativity.
Random Chaos, Guilty Pleasures and The Garden of Earthly Delights | Stephen Gray
Stephen Gray, Roogalator, mixed media
NOVEMBER 2023
CENTER GALLERY
Random Chaos, Guilty Pleasures and The Garden of Earthly Delights | Stephen Gray
In my current body of work I have used contemporary and nostalgic toys reconfigured to form strange new creations. Stuffed animals and mechanical toys have been disassembled and rearranged in order to transform them into a new mythology. The cartoonish nature of these materials lends itself to the creation of an imagery that can be both humorous and perverse. Stylistically the work is in the tradition of comic grotesque. The grotesque functions as a metaphor for the incongruous nature of the human condition, comedy says that which is true that you would do anything to deny is true. A subversion of an idyllic vision of nature, the beautiful and the ugly, the humorous and the tragic are inextricably interwoven, creating associations that exude a fascination with a world that explains itself in contradiction.
