Anchorage Daily News

If winter numbs initiative into a state of hibernation, it also stimulates imagination. Something about the cold, the dark, the stillness -- the otherworldly views of frosted trees, frozen bodies of water, low sun and long shadows -- stirs up wild artistic dreaminess, at least in some.

If the rest of us can extrude ourselves from our sleeping bags, a few days from now we'll get an eyeful of their chilly visions.

"Freeze," which kicks off with a New Year's Eve party at the Anchorage Museum on Thursday, is described as "a celebration of Alaska and life in the North" through conferences, exhibitions, films, lectures and performances that will fill January and run into early February. It's organized by the museum, the Alaska Design Forum and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art.

Events will unfold at various locations, but the most visible manifestation will appear on a four-block long stretch of the Delaney Park Strip where "a bold series of large-scale outdoor installations" by some of the most creative people in Alaska, joined by a troupe of talented international designers and artists, will be constructed primarily from "the exquisite northern elements of snow, ice and light."

Such as?

• Two black Cadillacs frozen in a giant cylinder of clear ice; you can walk on top of the block and look down at glowing headlamps.

• A big pile of snowballs -- hundreds of them -- with LED lights.

• A coil of tall snow walls into which you wander, as if in a labyrinth, before arriving at a central fire pit.

• Sixty human head forms that may be ice or water -- it's not easy to tell.

• A catapult that takes whatever snow form you create and hurls it into a catching device that sends it into a pot where it's melted for use in something consumable like cocoa.

These and similar projects will be linked with a cross-country ski trail in a big figure-8 shape. They generally involve collaborations between artists and people whose work involves the manipulation of materials for decidedly practical purposes.

Like the Anchorage design firm of Mayer Sattler-Smith, best known for its award-winning architectural projects, which has paired up with painter Marisa Fabretto -- born in Seward, lives in Germany -- to produce a "mirror" of snow and ice. The south-facing, 20-foot-tall concave shape will reflect and amplify light.

Similarly, those ice-bound Cadillacs will be the work of general contractor Buck Walsky, architect Dave Cole and sculptor Rachelle Dowdy. The 60 human heads are the brainchild of multimedia artist Sheila Wyne and architect Mike Mense. Another local pair, poet Bruce Farnsworth and photographer Hal Gage, plan to lift blocks of ice from Cook Inlet and set them out of context on the urban Park Strip.

Many of the presenters come from Outside. Molo Design, the "team" proposing to build the labyrinth, is from Vancouver, British Columbia. Artist/artchitect/curator Claudia Kappl, making those illuminated snowballs, is from Austria. The catapult will be the work of San Francisco multidisciplinary group Futurefarmers and Belgian architect Lode Vranken. "Ice Fracture," which involves ice pylons with lights triggered by the motions of visitors, will be the work of Montreal researcher Ana Rewakowicz and Kobayashi + Zedda Architects of Whitehorse.

Something called "Crate," which uses recorded voices and radiant heaters, also set off by the viewer, is planned by Iceland architects Studio Granda and dancer Helena Jonsdottir.

Not everything will be on the Park Strip. Black + White Studio Architects and artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs will involve nine armatures "to isolate and amplify phenomena found at that particular location" at Elderberry Park, and a walk-through "Icequarium" by New York transplant Jonny Hayes and landscape architect Peter Briggs will be built at the Anchorage Museum Plaza.

Several of the descriptions of team projects are hard to envision. Los Angeles' CK-Architecture and environmental artist Lita Albuquerque are making a table of oil and water that lines up with the "precise direction of the sun at the exact moment of the 50-year anniversary of Alaska statehood" -- which will be exactly one week before the Park Strip installations are to open.

We'll just have to wait and see.

The whole idea of Freeze has the feel of a biennale -- sprawling, temporary, genre-defying exhibits of contemporary art held every two years, which is what "biennale" means in Italian. In fact organizer Julie Decker -- Anchorage artist, historian and curator -- says that's the concept that led her to come up with the Freeze idea.

Biennales usually take place in warm places: Florence, Sydney, Cairo, Nantes, Houston, Istanbul, Paris, Israel, Singapore and Sao Paulo. A few pop up in colder places: Iowa, Moscow, Liverpool. But the best known occur in places synonymous with sun, heat and high humidity where even fragile materials can be left outdoors -- like the most famed of them all, the Venice Biennale, where celebrities and beautiful people in shorts and bikinis wander through the art as if it were some intellectual incarnation of the Cannes Film Festival.

How will it work in Anchorage? What if it gets so cold that even the fieriest imagination decides to crawl in bed with dormant ambitions and slumber until it warms up? What if it snows so hard that the work is buried under more media than the artists can manage? What if it rains?

Such meteorological uncertainties have often dogged Alaska's other outdoor cold-weather shows like the Fur Rondy snow sculpture competition in February or Fairbanks' fantastic ice-carving festival in March.

We'll just have to wait and see about that too.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

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