Anchorage Daily News

Ideas tumble out of the head like foam peanuts, clinging to clothes, falling in couplets and threesomes, vanishing under the furniture, up the cuffs of pants, into narrow pockets of space.

Artist Wanda Seamster wants to collect all her ideas. She wants to transform each into a miniature to set aside and beside the others. She wants to turn the small into the mighty, the many into the whole.

So she made hundreds of art cards for a solo show at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center. "Run" consists of more than 800 pieces about the size of a Pokemon or baseball card, each with its own melding of material, content, design, each unique and yet necessarily connected to the rest.

"When I die," Seamster said, "I would like someone to find 5,000 of these things that they didn't know were there."

An eccentric goal, perhaps, but a likely one: Even before retiring as a science illustrator and designer for the University of Alaska in 2004, Seamster had already produced an impressive body of work.

In fact, "Run" is both the biggest and smallest solo show in the museum's history -- biggest in number, smallest in size.

Art cards may make it easier for Seamster to convert every idea into art, but they also allow her to push some ideas in many directions.

In Julie Decker's 1999 book, "Icebreakers: Alaska's Most Innovative Artists," she described Seamster as a masterful draftsperson whose work centers on social issues, the human condition and memory. Last week, she addressed how Seamster's art cards broaden not just the number but also the scope of her body of work.

"I have seen many of the artist cards but not the full 800," Decker said. "It seems they combine many of her interests -- drawing, photography and collage -- but also social and political issues, the human condition, memory and satire."

Seamster got involved in Anchorage's art community in the 1990s, turning heads with detailed portrayals of dragonflies and other subjects, like that of "Specimens," a scientific-looking graphite drawing of disembodied male genitalia tagged and pinned to a backboard. She won the 1992 All Alaska Juried Art Exhibition drawing award for the piece.

The drawing "created a stir in terms of public access to challenging works of art," Decker said.

Since then, Seamster has won awards in photography, sculpture and collage and has exhibited in every major venue in Alaska, in virtually every major group show and 21 solo exhibits.

While showing and talking about art cards last week, Seamster spoke about working five hours a day in the studio. Retirement comes easy, she said, because she can now do art driven by her own specifications, her own impulses, her own thoughts.

As she opened several drawers of a card catalog formerly owned by the library and now filled with art cards, Seamster gestured to her stash and smiled.

"I just can't make these things fast enough for my ideas, she said.

EVIL TWIN

Seamster makes art cards not just to cover a lot of ground quickly but also to pose questions about the appropriate size of art.

"If you look at the size of trading cards, they're like much of the art we see today," Seamster said, "like watching a film on an iPod or seeing every label on every can in the grocery store, all made by artists, or carrying or wearing small things like jewelry. What's considered small is demeaned, but what's miniature is precious."

Small works tend to be accessible to beginners but are difficult to do well, she continued, setting up a dialectic between craft work and fine art, trading card economics and the act of creation.

When she first heard about making and trading art cards, she considered it a brilliant idea -- until she heard about artists giving them away. "I thought, great, another thing artists are supposed to do for free."

Rest assured, her art cards are not for the taking. She mounted them in series on the wall, ricocheting one batch off another based on color and orientation (vertical versus horizontal). Though she will price some individually, most will be sold in groups of 30, 15 and seven.

Artist Sheryl Maree Reily trades cards with Seamster.

"(Her) work is small in the same way that a bee sting is small," said Reily, of Fairbanks. "She is deliberate in the sizing of her art, utilizing a scale that forces the viewer to approach the work where it is usually immediately physically and metaphorically in one's face."

Seamster's cards range from species illustrations to portraits and images that look like political posters.

One of her favorites, "Petey's Collection of Religious Figurines," depicts a pudgy, short-snouted dog collecting figurines. This odd collage bridges her fascination with animals to ideas of iconography and ideology. Other works hark back to her species drawings at UA and to reflections on memory, a repeating theme in her work.

In her artist statement, she writes, "A visual miniature can be a photograph, jewelry, souvenir, memento, tiny diorama, toy, amulet or other image. The miniature denotes preciousness or an attempt to preserve a memory. These are its most obvious qualities. But a miniature can also denote individual ownership as well as intellectual, emotional or physical control. While 'small' is often meant to imply insignificance, the value and meaning of the miniature, in whatever form it takes, is always larger than the object itself."

She finds it fascinating how people remember and create memories, she said, perhaps most acutely demonstrated in her family portraits and self-portraits.

"Some may think I have a lot of self-portraits, but even in the sets that have them, many are really my twin sister," she said.

Pulling out examples, she found it difficult to remember which were of her and which were of her sister.

GOING 3-D

When working small, "you're just about limitless in what you can use," Seamster said. "A bartender in town saved the foil wraps from wine bottles for me to use. I use stuff I find: bingo buttons, candy wrappers, toys, used metal, shells, glass, smashed bottle caps."

By letting materials flow with ideas, she generates pieces of about the same size yet individual in process, medium, subject matter.

For Reily, each becomes a complete work, "with or without the collective power of multiples. Even the reinventions are true to (Seamster's) origins as a graphic artist and the times in which she lives, a la Warhol and war."

Reily likes to view the work "as lap art laminated like baseball cards in a folder to be perused at leisure."

The museum setting prevents that kind of intimacy, of course, so the aggregate will present its own totality. A self-described A-type personality, Seamster mapped out each card's position weeks ago.

Most viewers will probably respond to the sheer number of works, Decker said, because "it will take time to get close and study the individual images and words to find meaning."

In that way, "Run" does exactly what Seamster intends. As Reily observed, "The content is often confrontational, insinuating we need to get up close and personal, mindful of our choices and the potential results."

The show certainly reflects Seamster's singular and identifiable sensibility, said artist Rachelle Dowdy of Fairbanks. "She mixes humor, political commentary, pop-culture imagery and objects in surprising juxtapositions."

Seamster even includes a batch of three-dimensional pieces, bucking the concept of "card" altogether. One assemblage integrates smashed coins, a name badge and a photograph into a rendering of a drive-in movie screen; another melds a plastic horse body with a slab as tall as the body as its head, itself depicting the image of a horse's head.

While holding each in her palm, Seamster stood among collections of garage sale finds, art, light coming through the windows and her studio cat.

Here in the second floor of her Airport Heights home, she makes what she pleases, precise as always but without the dictates of someone else's deadlines and printing methods, projects and ideas.

"It's wonderful, " she said. "Retirement is the best part of my life."

Find Dawnell Smith online at adn.com/contact/dsmith or call 257-4587.

RUN, Wanda Seamster's solo show, continues through Nov. 9 in the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, 121 W. Seventh Ave. (www.anchoragemuseum.org, 343-6173). Find images of Seamster's work, articles on art, and political posters at

wandaseamster.com

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