At first glance the necklace seems innocuous enough, a meticulously assembled assortment of beads and ornaments. But then you see that the bullet-shaped cylinders arrayed around it are, well, bullets.
Live bullets, says artist Rebecca Starry, and big ones, 30.06, .300 Winchester. Really Alaskan.
Starry is one of six artists given $500 awards in "Earth, Fire and Fibre XXVII," which opens at the Anchorage Museum on Friday. Juror Patricia Watkinson gave the prize to Starry for a collection of four pieces she submitted to the competition.
In addition to "High Caliber Collar," Starry's "Dangerous Goods" series included similarly stunning beaded necklaces incorporating drill bits and chuck keys ("Twisted"), scissors ("Runs with Scissors") and a chain saw blade ("Be Stihl My Heart"). There was also a necklace composed of razor blades, but she didn't enter that one.
"I intended for the art to appear visually pleasing upon the first look, then draw the viewer into the piece and reward them with the surprise element incorporated within," said Starry, who has been beading for 20 years and whose day job is as an investigator with the state's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in Anchorage.
She enjoys using small beads, she said, because she can work with a great amount of detail and compose full-bodied three-dimensional pieces. But in the "Dangerous Goods" series she had to address what she called "other engineering challenges -- because the bullets are heavy."
Starry was not the only beader Watkinson picked for the winners circle. Paula Rasmus-Dede of Chugiak had two three-dimensional pieces in glass beads selected. Homer's Rika Mouw was selected for a body of work that included one piece featuring beads and salmon skin and a necklace composed of mussel shells on silver wire.
A more traditionally composed necklace, using silver, gold and diamonds, was one of a pair of jewelry pieces that earned Anne Lingener-Reece of Anchorage another of the $500 prizes.
Watkinson, the former director of the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state, also picked two fabric artists for awards, Diane Melms of Anchorage, whose selected work features bright geometric designs, and Wendy Smith-Wood of Sutton for her alluring silk stoles.
The top prize, the $1,000 Juror's Choice Award, went to Margo Klass of Fairbanks. Klass is represented in the show by four sculptural volumes titled "Book of Good Intentions."
The books have porcelain covers protecting pages decorated with stencils using the pochoir process, a technique popular with publishers in the 1920s and associated with art deco; it uses different stencils to guide the application of different colors.
The whole is laced at the spine in the ancient Coptic binding style, which makes it easy to lay the book and its pages flat.
One hundred and thirteen Alaska artists submitted work to the juror. A total of 82 pieces by 51 artists were selected for the biennial exhibit,
Alaska's oldest and most prestigious juried showcase of fine art inspired by traditional crafts -- fabric, woodwork, pottery and so forth.
After "Earth, Fire and Fibre XXVII" closes here in early January, it will tour other museums in the state.
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.
Photo show ends in Anchorage
At the same time "Earth, Fire and Fibre XXVII" debuts, "Alaska Positive," the Alaska State Museum's biennial photography exhibition, will make its farewell appearance, sharing the First Friday opening reception slot at 7 p.m. on Sept. 4 at the Anchorage Museum. The exhibition was juried by California photographer Bill Owens, who selected 56 photographs from a pool of 250 images submitted by 80 Alaskans. Owens awarded the Juror's Choice prize to Bonnie Landis of Anchorage for "Rooftop," from her acclaimed collection of haunting pictures of the enormous, derelict Buckner Building in Whittier. Owens wrote in his juror's statement. "The winner was a landscape image with an abandoned building that had the composition and color, the mountains and the mist, and spoke to me over other images." The exhibit opened in Juneau last year and has been touring the state. The Anchorage Museum will be its final venue. It will remain on display through Oct. 25.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com