It took some time to collect the thousands of oyster shells now covering the walls and surfaces of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage — but not as long as you might think.
“A month and a half, and we were up to 3,000 or so,” said Anchorage artist Yulia Kalagaeva.
The buckets kept filling up, and soon she and collaborator Joshua Demain “had just been buried in the stinky, stinky shells that we had. We had to clean each one of them by hand.
“Thank God it was winter,” Kalagaeva observed.
The oyster shells, now clean and varnished, feature prominently in a multimedia show now at the South Gallery of IGCA by Kalagaeva and Demain, who collaborate under the name 4and2is6.
The shells cover a third of the walls, are piled on a gilded table and crushed into crunchy heaps on the floor (the “meat” in the shells is ceramic). Graphite and charcoal drawings are hung on the upper walls — some still lifes, some portraits of the two artists.
So where did the oysters come from? Not from these artists’ appetite (or wallets) alone. “We couldn’t afford to eat all these oysters. I mean — I wish,” Kalagaeva said.
Knowing they wanted the shells — without knowing what they wanted to do with them — Kalagaeva and Demain went around to Anchorage restaurants last November, handing out buckets and asking staff to set aside the shells left over from their customers’ meals. F Street, Kincaid Grill, Altura Bistro, Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge and Jens’ Restaurant all started diverting oyster shells to the mysterious endeavor.
Restaurants are busy places, and they didn’t expect to get much. “Then it became insanity,” Kalagaeva said, as restaurant staff passed along piles and piles of the mollusks. As they made rounds collecting the buckets, it felt like people were excited to be a part of the project, she said. After about a month, their fingers raw from scrubbing the shells, they had enough.
It all went into the show, titled “Obsessions.” Kalagaeva and Demain share an obsessive type of personality, they said in a recent interview, sitting together at a table loaded with oyster shells as light poured through IGCA’s big street-front window. It’s a concept that plays a big part in their relationship, starting when they first met as art students at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the late ‘90s.
Back then they never hung out together outside of class, but both recalled an intense connection from their time working in the studio. They would always sit together, shoulder to shoulder, and work for hours, losing track of time, feeding off each other’s energy. After a couple years, Demain moved temporarily across the country, and the two lost touch for decades. They reconnected in 2023 and “the inspiration was immediately coming back, flooding in again,” Demain said.
They began making art in the studio together and increasingly collaborating, adding to each other’s pieces. The tipping point was the annual fine arts market at The Nave last October. They had a booth, but nothing to put in it.
Food is fun, they thought. Why not food? In just five days, they made over 450 ceramic sculptures for the market — apples, pomegranates, figs, pears, fortune cookies, shrimp, sardines, carrots and more, all hand-painted and varnished.
“That’s how we learned we were very, very obsessive” about their work, Kalagaeva said. The pieces were a big hit, and they realized something.
“Everyone had a relationship with an oyster. Not everyone had a relationship with an apple. People either hated them and they had to tell us everything about their deep hatred, or they adored them, or someone’s husband’s loved them and she had to put up with it, and all these things started flooding out.”
Along the way, as the shells were being collected and cleaned and varnished, the pair modified furniture for the installation and created a series of drawings. Some are still lifes, others are portraits of Kalagaeva and Demain. The pieces are drawn by both artists, they said. Overall the installation feels like stepping in a couple’s domestic life, albeit covered in varnished bivalves.
“This concept of the oyster became sort of representational for us, of a beginning for us, and this display of decadence is endearing. It’s fascinating and, you know, and it’s fun to marvel at,” Demain said.
The pair said there will be future projects for 4and2is6. The element they want to continue exploring isn’t necessarily food — they’re not planning their next show around cabbages or petit fours.
“The integral part is interacting with the people getting the oysters, collecting the oysters and talking to the people at the restaurants who were saving them,” Demain said. “And now they can’t think about oysters any other way.”
Statement color
“Obsessions” is showing alongside two colorful shows for the remainder of the month.
“The stubborn blindness of optimistic philosophers” is a series of sculptures by Anchorage artist Graham Dane. It’s a playful collection of pieces with amusing titles (“Either deadly or magnificent?”) that mixes intense colors — acid greens with dark cobalts and bright yellow. The primordial-looking shapes often have bright cubes springing from their borders.
“All abstraction is open to interpretation which is one of its aspects that I find appealing and I rarely go into detailed explanations about meanings of titles or the literary references,” Dane wrote about his work on the IGCA website.
“It reminds me of the sculptures in the first ‘Beetlejuice’ film,” one person remarked, looking at a piece that could be fairly construed as either a carnivorous plant or an organism under an epidemiologist’s microscope.
In the center gallery, Ted Kincaid’s explosively vibrant paintings center on political or philosophical figures, from Karl Marx to Lisa Murkowski, in a style that’s graffiti meets indie comic art. Kincaid wrote that he wanted to move political discussion beyond depictions of a problem into the realm of possible solutions — the side that says “now what?”
“It is easy to be cynical, but what does it look like to be hopeful in an actionable way?” he wrote.
“Obsessions,” “Our Better Angels” and “The stubborn blindness of optimistic philosophers” will be on view at the International Gallery of Contemporary through Friday, June 27. Open 1-4 p.m. Thursday-Sunday at 427 D St. (907-279-1116, igcaalaska.org).
Reporting for this project was supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.