Anchorage Daily News

An art show billed as nude self-portraits on display at a bar advertised as "Alaska's gay entertainment complex" may suggest prurience. But Aakatchaq Schaeffer's "A Revealing Beyond Nudity," showing at Mad Myrna's through Nov. 28, will appeal more to the aesthetic intellectual than to the libertine.

The show is "not about the nudity," the artist said. "It's about what's behind it."

Aakatchaq, who turns 34 next month, uses just her first name -- accent on the first syllable -- for her artwork. Originally from Kotzebue, she attended and graduated from the University of Oklahoma, where she studied creative writing. She began painting there too, though she never studied it. That omission is evident in the raw technique seen in this show.

Yet an instinctual gift for the difficult craft of portraiture was also evident in her well-wrought depictions of elders painted on caribou skin, which popped up in Anchorage venues five years ago. While she has experimented and evolved since then, the human face and figure has remained a constant in her exhibited work.

Her career was put on hold when she killed James Lee in 2004. Her attorney argued that Lee, her boss and lover, presented a threat to the defendant. The well-publicized legal proceedings lasted until April 2007, when she pleaded no contest to criminally negligent homicide, was sentenced to 500 hours of community service and returned to Kotzebue.

Over the past year or so, her art began to show up in Anchorage again. A portrait was included in the Koahnic (KNBA) art auction in February. This past summer she had a solo show at the Alaska Native Arts Foundation gallery.

"When that closed, I went back to Kotzebue, retrieved all my art materials and decided to bring my nudes," she said, "because I'd never shown them before."

Now living in Anchorage, Aakatchaq, an Inupiaq, planned to have her work at the Alaska Federation of Natives Arts and Crafts sale. But she missed out on getting a space -- "My table was given away," she said -- and had to find a new site.

That's when Mad Myrna's offered its showroom, a dimly lit, low-ceilinged, dark-paneled, windowless, broken-up space with tables, bar and platforms for performers and deejays.

Why hold an exhibition in such an unlikely spot? "It was available right now," the artist said.

The pieces at the ANAF show were masklike forms made with caribou skin, fur and hair. The current display is all paintings, mostly acrylic pastel on paper. Not all are self-portraits, she admitted, and few are overt nudes.

In several cases, the face dominates, with other anatomical details hidden under an applique of handmade paper. The three-dimensionality is shared by the mask forms, which also evoke an air of mystery and concealment; one is tempted to think of a Muslim hijab and veil, cloaking every aspect of a woman except her eyes. But the artist is striving for a visual impression, not a message. "There's no hidden meaning," she insisted.

Those paintings that can be clearly identified as nudes have a surreal quality. One pairing imagines her as a fetus, naked in the womb, and again as an adult in the same fetal position. In another, she sees herself as an extraterrestrial, bereft of hair as well as clothes.

Some paintings are fairly representational, others suggest woodblock prints, including one executed on a window blind. There's an imitation of Goya's horrific "Saturn Devouring His Son," an abstract, and some -- like the fairly recent "Wood Females" -- are drawn exclusively with monochromatic lines. The newest work, an elongated portrait of an elder, almost looks like a manipulated photograph.

Two of the paintings include words from the artist's poems. "You have severed my tongue and have left my body in a heap of corpses," reads one.

"The story I heard (in Kotzebue) was about Native hunters who killed some caribou and took only the tongues, which are a delicacy," she explained. "It was absolutely appalling. I did a bunch of poems about the caribou."

She places the grim words firmly on her own face, identifying the animals' vulnerability with her own.

Aakatchaq said the bulk of the paintings in this show were done a few years ago, during "a difficult time." Dissatisfied with a seminal attempt at nude painting, she had a friend take photos of her and became her own model.

"They were kind of a new beginning in the sense of revealing myself," she said, "to maybe move away from the past and become a different person."

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

A REVEALING BEYOND NUDITY, artwork by Aakatchaq, will remain on display at Mad Myrna's Showroom, 530 E. Fifth Ave., through Nov. 28. Mad Myrna's opens daily at 4 p.m. except Sundays at noon.

VIEW Aakatchaq's artwork at www.eskimoart.blogspot.com. Visit her personal site at

www.myspace.com/aakatchaq

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