Arts and Entertainment

These international artists turned to high-tech media to describe life in the north

Each year the Anchorage Museum dedicates major space to a summer "blockbuster" show. In previous years, such exhibits have tended to have a local hook and aimed for a popular tourist season market. For instance: "Gold" (2009) with nuggets and mining gear, "Mammoths" (2011) with bones and full-size models and "Arctic Flight" (2013) with a whole biplane and bits of a dirigible.

This year's big exhibit is a different, artifact-free species. "View From Up Here: The Arctic at the Center of the World" is less about things and more about the idea of showing the most vibrant parts of life in high latitudes, things that are invisible to most of the world.

Using installations, videos, photographs and sculpture by an international cast of artists, "View" is intended to convey "a complexity of place and people … presenting the North from a broader perspective."

Broader than what isn't specified. If artistic depictions beyond moose-and-cache art are meant, there's been plenty of that over the years with exhibits of avant-garde constructions by Alaskan and out-of-state artists. But "View" may be Alaska's first big group show of cutting edge art on a single theme, at least on the scale now presented at the Anchorage Museum.

As such, it may perplex some visitors expecting more familiar art genres, whether traditional or modern. Perhaps the best way to appreciate the show is to approach it as multimedia entertainment with a message.

Most of the dozen distinct gallery components use video. The most straightforward is Anna Hoover's "Alaxsaq," which resembles a PBS documentary with clear images, narration and interviews. The project took six months, said the filmmaker, the daughter of the late sculptor John Hoover. It will probably be the part of the exhibit that most Alaskans will readily recognize as a reflection of the state.

More amorphous is "Legends Are Made Here" by Derek Cote of Detroit. Cote and New York composer Paul Haas visited the state last summer and worked at the project from two directions. "Paul and I went on an adventure," Cote said. "The goal was to see as much of Alaska as possible, everything that wasn't Anchorage." The result has the feel of a slow travelogue of beautiful cinematography and Haas' music played by members of the Anchorage Symphony.

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Marek Ranis, a Pole now living in North Carolina, also uses a kind of documentary format, but without narration. "Like Shishmaref" juxtaposes alarming footage of Shishmaref, Alaska, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two low-lying places particularly threatened by the sea.

The video installations become more bewildering with Danish filmmaker Annesofie Norn's "Longing for Forward," a room in which four screens show aspects of Greenland — hunting, games, politics — all at the same time. A sign says 11 hours of viewing would be needed to take it all in. The purpose of the installation, apparently, is not to expect anyone to sit through it all, but to pick up a feeling for Greenland. The feeling I got was of being in a television control room surrounded by monitors running different feeds.

Sitka artist Nicholas Galanin has better results with "Envoy." Only two screens on opposite walls run and it takes less than two minutes to see it all. One screen has sped-up footage of traffic at a gas station. The other shows a polar bear pacing back and forth in a zoo enclosure, a comment on the futility of urban humanity's daily busy-ness. Galanin's trademark piquant humor is at its best here.

It's harder to know what to make of "The Diluted Hours" by Magall Daniaux and Cedric Pigot of Paris. They burned a pile of wood, seen on one video screen, in Kotzebue, perhaps glimpsed in footage of wind generators on another screen, and then used the ashes to make an LP record that plays in between the two screens. The monotonous sound is somewhat like the drone of a small airplane on a long flight.

Paul Walde's "The Alaska Variations" is another piece in contemporary audio-visual media. The Canadian "intermedia artist" has prepared several videos in which a man lips a trombone on a frozen lake, draws a slow circle in the ice, or conducts an experiment with salt water and camp stoves in the snow. The process of setting up the experiment is shown in detail, the outcome is not as five identical kettles on burners close out the vignette.

Another vignette features a still image of a Chugach valley as a highlight line slowly crosses the main screen; musicians are shown on flanking screens playing the rather ambitious music. In another we look at long shots of similar scenery for a minute or more before a car drives by and the camera keeps rolling for another minute or two, at least, after the car has passed. Then a similar bit of action in a different location. On the side screens we see assorted percussion in the back of the car making the noise that accompanies the film.

If the purpose is to make us aware of the stunning beauty of our area, something most of us ignore as we drive through or pursue our chores every day, then it worked for me. I liked the big, clear images of the scenery more than whatever intrusion was superimposed on it and resolved to get up into the country more often this summer.

I watched a big chunk of "The Alaska Variations," though not all. But most people stuck their head in for a minute or so and walked off. Perhaps they had something more exciting to do than watch kettles come to a boil.

"The Mariner's Oubliette" in "Matrix," an installation on the fourth floor by Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson, is another enigmatic video, consisting of close-ups of whale bones and what look like underwater shots. Photos of Barrow hunting camps stretch along the walls. But the most intriguing things are glass models of polar bear dens. The data came from infrared cameras and the transparent replicas, or "maquettes," give a fascinating three-dimensional view of the these bear-built, under-the-snow condominiums.

Another fascinating sculpture is Los Angeles-based designer Christoph Kapeller's 12-foot high depiction of a yedoma. His "Yedoma: Mounds of Life" display includes photos and video of the permafrost cliff on the Itkillik River. Yedomas, he explained, are ice-rich permafrost formations found throughout the Arctic. They can only grow in places where there are no glaciers, Kapeller said, and because the ice and soil form at the same rate, they contain significant information about climate and biology of the past. They also contain a lot of biomass that can briefly come to life before decaying — hence the nickname of such features, "the stinking hills."

The yedoma display shares the space with Jeroen Toirkens' photo gallery, "The Edge of Tomorrow." The Dutch photographer is best known for taking photographs of nomadic people in Asia, but for this project he spent time in Wales and Little Diomede. Neither village was ever nomadic, especially Little Diomede, the tiny island where people have had established homes for centuries. Pick-up-and-move travel was impractical, sometimes impossible. Even today, Toirkens said with a laugh, access is so difficult and the odds of getting weathered in are so high that it's called "the one-way island."

All other contributions by the other artists have rooms of their own. Ranis, for instance, has a construction, as well as his film. "Subsistence," made of maps draped over a steel frame, fills a room by itself. At its base is a sketch of a whale showing how the portions are distributed. The artist said it was to contrast the way indigenous people and settlers divide things.

The portion of "View" that comes closest to being "pure" art is John Grade's magnificent collection of glass and wood inspired by Japanese fishing floats. The enormous centerpiece hangs from the ceiling with a split wood cage around it. Grade, of Seattle, said the cage was made from hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces, hand carved, then glued together into a grand, flowing form.

"It was a very slow and patient process," he said. "It took four of us working on it for several months."

Other parts of "View" are outside. "The Arctic Food Forest" by Brooklyn artist Mary Mattingly has plastic containers filled with native, and some intrusive, plants: rhubarb, spruce, weeds and so forth. And the museum's atrium has been turned into a "living room," with a faux fireplace and pillows shaped like stream rocks.

The show, or parts of it, will travel to Canada and other locations after it closes in Anchorage on Oct. 2. Several of the artists will be returning to Alaska for other projects or as artists in residence at the museum, including Grade.

"I've caught the Alaska bug as a result of this project," he said. "I know I'll want to do more."

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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