Kayo Bogdan, Birch II (detail), fiber
The theme of the exhibition is an Alaskan forest. I aim to create a forest scene that many Alaskans feel close to their hearts by using yarns as media. I want the viewers to enjoy the squishy feel of fiber art and discover how versatile yarns can be and how simple stitches can create rich textures. You are invited to touch gently and feel the textures of my pieces.
Rachel Mulvihill, Driveway, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
Rachel Mulvihill (she/her) is a landscape painter of Unangan heritage born in Fairbanks, Alaska. As an artist who represents place, her interest and approach is formed by her upbringing in Fairbanks the homeland and traditional territories of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples where she continues to live and work.
Artist Statement
These paintings are not about trees. These paintings are about sight. They are about seeing and what we see when we look at landscape. They are also about where we stand when we look at landscape—the site. How is a landscape framed? How is nature framed by landscape? These trees are out of place: rooted in Fairbanks and here today in Anchorage, on the land of the Eklutna Dena’ina people. Are these “Alaskan” landscapes? My motivations as a painter stem from the complexities of this landscape.
Landscape has/is a history of naturalizing erasures, revisions, and constructed perspectives. Not only does landscape orient and produce it’s viewer but it also can transform the land itself. When I think about landscape I think about stepping back—a perspective of distance and framing from outside a space. Hito Steyerl has suggested that this metaphor could now been more accurately described as a falling backwards. Steyerl describes a “deteritorialized freedom” as a product of vertical perspective. The boundaries that describe spaces disappear as our perspective becomes untethered from a stable horizon and ground. Does untethered perspective do more to reveal or obscure the entanglements that complicate the landscape?
What can the positioning of landscape reveal about its relationship to place? I thought I was painting a referendum of the vertical perspective but I wonder if these paintings are an example of it (or an example of how difficult it can be to be grounded). They are untethered landscapes. Their site is both specific—to Fairbanks, to my experience—but also moving and transforming. Is landscape what I observe, is it the photograph that I take into my painting studio, or is it here, framed by this gallery space?
If being grounded is not always comfortable then it might be easier to experience place at a distance or through a frame. Being grounded is a metaphor for a state of mind as well as a lived experience of place. Being grounded can also be a way of understanding, acknowledging, and caring for the place where I am. There are myriad literal and imaginative ways to be elsewhere. For many people, including myself, being or becoming grounded may be/will be uncomfortable. In these paintings I wanted to look behind the metaphor of a groundless position.
Artist Q&A:
Can you tell us a little about your background?
I grew up in downtown Anchorage. I went to school on the East Coast and West Coast, but kept coming back to Alaska. Growing up in the environment of Anchorage gave me an opportunity to have the freedom to explore unconventional ways of building, doing, and being than you might have in a rural setting, or fully urban setting. You still have the connection to industry and art. There is the freedom of the rural, but the information and materials that come along with being in a city. It is the space and environment that keeps bringing me back, paired with the inherit wildness of the individuals who live here.
How do you think your work as both a wildland firefighter and architect influences your art?
I spend summers working as a Wildland Firefighter. This work influences me as an architect and artist. The reason I like architecture is the same reason I do art. It is the communication of one’s soul that drives art. My growing up with art was my means of learning and understanding the world. I was able to learn more about academics. This was my foray into architecture. From an early age I was showing understanding of learning by creating art to demonstrate my ideas. This was a direct tie to going into architecture.
Working as a wildland firefighter, we put a year’s worth of work into 5 months. This intensity parces away unnecessary aspects of life. For example, a wildland firefighter's pants are cut short, sitting just below the top of the boot. While it looks silly it keeps the cuffs from dragging in the mud or getting caught on sticks while a tree is falling. This willingness to remove any hindrances to functionality transfers to my art and architecture. Functionality and usefulness take precedence over fashion and convention. If it’s not working, you get rid of it in a direct way. There is a pragmatism embedded in my work as an artist that comes from my work as a firefighter.
Can you describe your installation Borean Lines?
This piece is a mirror of my experience with Anchorage, in which a rural birch tree and an industrial conveyor belt makes sense to me. The scale of the tree and the width and material qualities of the conveyor belt are in balance. Both objects come from within 45 miles of the other. The conveyor belt allows me to play with the rigidity of the birch tree. Birch are amazing, they are the first tree to come back after a disturbance. They are a hardwood, but they grow quickly. In a high wind, they have an expressive way of bending and moving- rather than breaking. This piece is about the qualities of birch tree brought to the extreme.
What are you working on now, or alternatively, what do you want to be working on next?
This sculpture is titled “Borean Lines”. I would like to explore this further in a set of pieces that explore the expressiveness of the material, in the sense of the place. I am currently working on a long term study of Alaskan winters that track the passage of time and the palette of light that we experience in the winter months.
Elissa Pettibone has been exploring historic and local dyes for over a decade, experimenting with plant based dyes as an alternative to caustic dyes within the textile industry. Her experience with plant dyes started at The North House Folk School in Minnesota, throughout college at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and professionally on the east coast, primarily in Philadelphia and New York City, and now throughout Alaska. She has lectured, taught classes and produced custom natural dye orders for corporations, designers and artists. Her work is an investigation into the limitless spectrum of color that exists in our surrounding flora.
Artist Statement
Biology and chemistry dictate the outcome of all plant based dyework. Last summer, I learned that the combination of iron and alder provide a basic gall ink on fiber, almost fully black in color on protein fibers, which describes the high concentration of tannic acid within the plant. I hadn't seen another plant do this here in Alaska with such a strong reaction to the iron, so it only made sense to delve deeper. These works are studies of different mark making techniques using alder leaves, iron and a few other pH modifiers on linen. I look forward to working further with these processes with different parts of the alder plant along with different harvest times.
Trine Bumiller. In Memoriam 3, In Memoriam 10, and In Memoriam 8. Watercolor on mulberry paper. 78 x 28 inches each.
In Memoriam is an installation comprised of fifteen large watercolor paintings of spruces, one golden. Through the story of the Golden Spruce, it honors the memory of living things, both trees and humans, in a time when life seems more precious than ever.
Artist Statement
There was once a very special tree, on an island off the northwest coast of Canada, called the Golden Spruce. It was a Sitka spruce tree with golden needles, missing the chlorophyll to make it green. The Haida Native Americans, who lived in the area, considered it sacred. It was over 200 feet high and believed to be over 300 years old. In 1997, a former forest engineer cut the tree down in protest of logging companies that were destroying the local forests. The man disappeared before being brought to trial and has never been found.
The Sitka spruce only grows in the area of the northwest coast of the US and Canada. The trees are the third largest species in the world, growing to over 300 feet high. The Haida revere the trees for their many beneficial properties, as shelter, fuel, and dugout canoe wood; it is part of the lore of the tribe, and each child is assigned a tree at birth, to be their guardian. The Golden Spruce was considered sacred, and its demise a tragic loss for the tribe and the community.
My installation, In Memoriam, recalls and honors the story of the Golden Spruce, and all trees, and forests that have been and are being destroyed due to human intervention. It also speaks to our current times and memorializes many lives lost in this time of pandemic and senseless killings. Fifteen large watercolor paintings of majestic spruces on mulberry paper acknowledge and honor this history. They emphasize the verticality and height of these majestic beings, and evoke their human qualities of both power and fragility. In Memoriam speaks of lives lived and lost, of both the natural and human worlds.
One tree is golden, to reference the one special Golden Spruce, and to highlight the preciousness of what we have lost, to venerate and make sacred the spirit of the tree, as well as the spirits of lost human souls. Contrasting with the otherwise dark trees, it is a beacon of hope at the end of the installation. Walking through the installation should feel like being present in a vast forest, still and meditative, yet awed by the presence and precariousness of life.
