Anchorage Daily News

When not working part time at a bookstore in Palmer, Annie Aube collects romance novels and embroiders in her living room. She wears jeans and secondhand clothes and lets her dense, ruddy hair drop to her waist in tight curls.

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"Pretty in Pink," hand embroidery by Annie Aube

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"Little Red Riding Hood"

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The 26-year-old artist comes across as a square-up Valley child except for the quirks -- or because of them.

Don't expect "Home Sweet Home" sweetness in her needlework, for example. Aube prefers stitching stories about flayed limbs and fractured relationships, hairy women and brutal children, cruel stepmothers and doomed saints.

She took up embroidery less than two years ago, just a few months after getting her art degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2006. Now her work shows in venues as varied as the Galeria de Muerte in Tokyo, the Hyaena Boutique and Gallery in Burbank, Calif., and the Anchorage Museum as an award winner in the 2008 All Alaska juried show.

Her first professional solo show took place at the Hotcakes Gallery in Milwaukee, Wis., last summer, but her Anchorage solo debut happens this month at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, featuring needlework including the first piece of embroidery she ever made, "Chinnamasta," which shows a Hindu goddess holding a sword in one hand, her own severed head in another.

"She studied 'fiber' in college, but I'm pretty sure none of her fellow students graduated doing sewn images of blood dripping from a female's wounded heart or embroidered private parts," said Julie Decker, an artist, art historian, professor and gallery operator in Anchorage.

Aube considers "Chinnamasta" priceless because it marked her first foray into homespun fiber narratives involving strange, violent and occasionally erotic myths and folk tales. These days, her handiwork includes embroideries of saints and lovers, several new pieces traced from the covers of old, worn romance novels.

"They're like these cheesy '70s covers from books I got at Bishop's Attic for 10 cents each," Aube said. "I like the idea of putting them up next to the saints."

Her romance embroideries appear almost staid on off-white fabric, while the saints get a groovy appeal via colored cloth that looks almost Indian in texture and hue. She culled the images from a book of saints her mother gave her.

"The stories (in the book) are about how you need to be a good little girl or go to hell," she said. "They're these twisted stories that frighten kids into being scared little zombies."

Aube found herself fascinated by the women saints in particular -- "all virgins who die these horrible deaths, and you've got to love that, you know?"

A moment later, she smiled shyly at her own levity and added, "All my art is based on my twisted sense of humor."

IRONING OUT IRONY

Primitive in style and unflinching in perspective, Aube's embroidery comments on violence, authority, gender and culture through the tradition of women's work.

"They look raw and crude, and that is what is appealing about them," said Decker, who intends to include Aube in her latest book about Alaska art and artists. "It takes a minute to accept that they are actually quite sophisticated. They have a Frida Kahlo quality."

Artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs says Aube's work fits in the fiber art movement in which artists emphasize ideas that often transgress the medium itself. She mentioned a recent exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery," as an example of like-minded work.

Kelliher-Combs appreciates how Aube has developed her body of work while isolated from art centers and rooted in a community richly connected to farming and fiber work.

"I like how her work links women's work and the tradition of needlepoint and embroidery with these other ideas about women," said Kelliher-Combs, referring to Aube's use of folk tales about wild women or violence by and toward women. "It's ironic."

What comes off as ordinary in video games can seem arresting in embroidery; blood and mutilation stitched into muslin, trimmed with ruffles and rendered in thread says something entirely different about carnage and humanity than "Grand Theft Auto." In truth, Aube's work makes people nervous.

A Tokyo gallery owner who discovered Aube's work on MySpace finds it profoundly fascinating.

"It looks cute, but her motifs are so intense and cruel," said Narutoshi Sekine. He bought pieces for himself and others for his gallery and record shop, Galeria de Muerte (www.galeriademuerte.com). When he took her work to the Tokyo 101 Contemporary Art Fair in 2007, many people were shocked but intrigued, he said.

When asked whether she feels brilliant about creating art that quickly reached international audiences, Aube shrugged and sighed. "Sometimes I do, but I also feel sad that most galleries don't want to work with me because they don't think they can sell it."

Frustration over markets comes with the territory, Decker said. "Edgy, quirky work automatically has a limited audience."

Yet the prickly nature of Aube's work appeals to alternative gallery owners and collectors. Galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo sell her work, and a collector from England owns three or four of them and actively seeks more. MySpace lets Aube reach beyond the Valley boundaries.

Of course, art that fits a niche can backfire, as when a gallery expects gnarly imagery as a matter of course, like portraits of serial killers and zombie art, Aube said. But she isn't about the blood as much as the twist in perception, medium, expectation and understanding.

Her chosen saints die by fire or the rack, she said, "but they always look so happy in the pictures."

DOWNSIZED AND UNBRIDLED

Aube recently downsized her life by ridding herself of excess books, clothes and household goods. But like every artist, she collects things, makes things, stores things. She owns an extensive collection of books on folk tales, myths and goddesses, not to mention art books, graphic novels and a new batch of romance novels.

Books inspire her work and always have. "The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine" roused Aube's fascination with embroidery in the first place.

Just as people use stories to influence and control behavior, embroidery has also historically been a way of controlling women, Aube said, so using needlework to depict feral women from folk tales, or children's games with demented outcomes, or serene saints destined to die horrible deaths poses unsettling truths about humanity.

Not that Aube thinks too much before letting her art unfold. "If you read people's artist's statements, they seem to have these deep ideas as foundations, but I find it hard to come up with those deep reasons for my work. I do it mostly because I'm appalled or fascinated."

Or she just likes the dresses, she said. With Aube, an image of a round, frilly skirt might make it into a scene of wicked brutality.

"Even if she just likes the dresses, it still makes it about women and she ends up with a powerful female voice," said Decker, who believes "contemporary folk art comes the closest to describing Aube's work, since it merges art and craft, but not in the sense that it's made by someone without formal training."

At the art fair in Tokyo, some people described Aube's work as outsider art, Sekine noted.

However it gets cataloged, Aube's work ditches the appearance of formal training and technical mastery to reach deeper into her material, like the deeper meaning of cannibalism in folk tales. As an Irish Catholic woman, she particularly likes Celtic tales, "the way they seem messed up and enthralling at the same time."

Aube once dreamed of owning sheep, spinning her own yarn, making her own clothes -- a dream founded on nostalgia for a simpler, cleaner life, she said -- but then she discovered the power of ideas in art.

"I was talking to someone the other day about the act of creation, and for me it's just not denying anything," she explained. "You don't deny ideas, you don't deny that scary ideas exist and are out there and that you think them too. Creating is not screening oneself. It's letting ideas flow even when they're a little off."

WORK BY ANNIE AUBE will be on display through July 27 at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, 427 D St. (www.igcaalaska.org, 279-1116). The gallery is open noon-4 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday.

DOLLS, a group exhibit from the Annex Gallery in Fairbanks, is also showing at the gallery.

TO SEE AND READ ABOUT what other fiber artists are doing, check out "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" at www.madmuseum.org. The show ended in April, but you can click on "see" and then "past exhibitions" for an overview.

1-Minute Biography: Annie Aube

Current job: Fireside Books in Palmer (www.goodbooksbad coffee.com)

Previous job most ill-suited for: Secretarial work

Lifestyle: Downsized, hippy, married apartment life

Most prized possession: Her sketchbook

Where to find her art online:

www.annieaube.comwww.myspace.com/annieaube

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