Those familiar with the work of Anchorage visual artist Sheila Wyne know to expect the confident statement, the well-evolved idea and the apt metaphor. They’re familiar with her thrillingly inventive use of materials and how her art is rooted in the here-and-now, growing out of multiple connections to communities small and large, close and widespread, often underscored by a concern with some of the largest issues facing our species. In this regard, her mostly brand-new works currently shown at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in downtown Anchorage (through Nov. 28) will not disappoint. They will only add to her reputation.
Wyne, 62, has been turning out art of varying kinds for several decades. She works in a range of mediums and venues, from public art projects to stage design to what she calls “multimedia urban art interventions in the built and natural environment.” She works solo and in collaboration with others. She fulfills projects for her clients and works to satisfy herself. She strikes me as the kind of artist who cannot help but be at work, making things. Whatever “found object” crosses her path, if her eye hits on something, it’s likely to end up as Sheila stuff, material to be repurposed, re-imagined, re-invented.
It needs to be said that I am probably incapable of being objective about her work, since Sheila is a friend of mine, someone I’ve known for more than 25 years. I’ve long admired her artistry. Nor is this the first time I’ve written about it. In 2001, I wrote for the Anchorage Daily News a review of a show, titled “Wait/Weight,” at the Kimura Gallery at UAA. Simply put, her work excites me. It often surprises me and elicits the kind of pleasurable reaction we get from meeting an attractive stranger who comes with a compelling mystery.
Wyne did not begin her adult life as an artist. She has said she trained originally in literature, which may explain a particular quality of her work, a dramatic tension that, whether obvious or subtle, leaps off the wall and into the mind. Her art, of course, satisfies through the delights of visual form, but it also talks. It doesn’t usually soothe or reassure. It’s like a probe, a finger pointed at the viewer, saying, “Here — think about this.”
The IGCA show, titled “Three Series,” consists of 19 pieces in three clusters — three very different sets of works — that nevertheless unify around the concept of humanity’s hubris in its treatment of the environment and, on the other side of that, the payback coming our way from an abused “Mother Earth, or Nature, or whatever you want to call it,” as Wyne put it in conversation.
“Drawn and Quartered,” a collection of seven mixed-media pieces, either comment explicitly on ecological ruin and human ignorance, or they elevate the natural world to a position where perhaps we might be encouraged to actually contemplate it. The first four of these, the only documentary works of the show, use photos, maps, paint, tarpaper, plywood, drawings and text to reflect on two early events of the American nuclear-bomb program. “Amchitka #1” and “Amchitka #2” remind us that the island in the Aleutians was the site of three underground blasts from 1965 to 1971, which caused enough of a radioactive mess that “remediation and monitoring” will continue there through at least 2025. “Project Chariot #1” and “Project Chariot #2” comment on the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1958 proposal to use five nuclear bombs to blast out a deep-water harbor at Cape Thompson on Alaska’s northwest coast. The project, as daft as it seems today, enjoyed vigorous support within the soon-to-be-49th-state. But the Inupiat inhabitants of the village of Point Hope, less than 25 miles from Cape Thompson, objected. The indigenous peoples of Alaska did not have to scratch their heads before realizing that the A.E.C. had given them and their world hardly a thought. With well-founded complaints, the Natives of Point Hope won backing from environmental groups, and opposition spread to the Lower 48. The A.E.C. backed off. The textual gloss on “Project Chariot #2” tells us, however, that the idea “has never been formally cancelled.” It is only “held in abeyance.”
Despite their explosive content, these four nuke-wary works are comparatively quiet, suffused with dark colors and shadows fitting their dim mood. They are not large, a few square feet each. They are almost identical in configuration. Each consists of a square on which appear the work’s primary visuals, and that square is paired with a smaller square whose image — a childlike drawing of a bomb, say, or the universal symbol for ionizing radiation — makes a sardonic comment on the principle message. The two squares are each fastened in a kind of geometric relationship to a thin strip of wood on which Wyne has drip-painted scores of vertical lines in a gradation of colors. She explained to me that the strips mimic a tool, called warming stripes, which climatologists use to graphically represent how, through the centuries (or any chosen period), the earth’s atmosphere is warming, the color changing from blue to red on the spectrum. Each of these bomb-concerned works, therefore, links the atomic age to our present era of climate warming. As Wyne says, “The choices we made in the state 50 years ago are part and parcel of how we got into the red zone.”
The series “Affectus” — five stunning works, each comprised of a facial cast, “manipulated found objects” and text — constitutes a gallery of people who appear to be in repose yet burdened with the kinds of crap that life and society lay on us at times. Each work consists of a brown leather horse collar framing a face which is festooned with an array of its own particular object — rifle shells in the work titled “Chrysalis,” Time Expired flags from old-style parking meters in “Aura,” eyeglass lenses in “Myopic,” gear wheels in “So Much, So Little Time,” and a horse’s bit and bridle in “Attachments.” A remarkable creativity is on display in every one. The works in “Affectus” are not shy or reticent. But they don’t shout either. They don’t have to. They make their metaphorical statements firmly and conclusively.
Besides containing an obvious pun, the Latin word Affectus describes a “state of mind, disposition, feelings and mood,” Wyne writes in her artist’s statement. The horse-collared individuals, she continues, are reflections of “some of our present concerns and reactions to the growing awareness of climate conditions.” The climate crisis was not my first thought on seeing these (I’ve been familiar with one of the five, “Attachments,” for several years and even used a photograph of it at one time as a Facebook avatar). What I do feel on looking at them is nightmarish entrapment, or bondage, a blind adherence to the rules we unthinkingly follow every day. Which isn’t far from Wyne’s intention.
“We’re all in harness to the climate,” she told me last week when I visited the gallery. “The climate doesn’t care about our choices.” The collars — who knew a thing like that had such potential! — combined with their facial casts amount to “switching the species,” Wyne said. “The designer of the collars [humanity] is now in the collars.” Like horses, “we’re all pulling along in reaction to climate change.”
The “Strata” series consists of seven large, spectacular works that Wyne has made out of found, manipulated and repurposed signage. Three of them are mosaics, the others are bas relief constructions. While each of these works (and nine of the other 12 in the show) was created since July, the origin of “Strata” dates to the late spring of 2019 when Wyne finished and installed a massive (12-by-14-feet) public art work inside the new engineering building at UAA. Titled “Ingenerare,” it too is a bas relief construction consisting of countless pieces of metal road signage cut, bent and arranged in a well-thought-out clutter, as if the pieces were haphazardly interwoven. But there is decisive form at play. Wyne set herself to completing “Ingenerare” after returning from a 3-week float down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The rock formations she saw in the canyon— their colors and patterns, shapes and conglomerations, their layering above all — gave her the last key. On returning to Anchorage, she knew how to organize the variegated metal strips. She then attached them to the support panel, row by row, one color or shade above another, in a new kind of stratification.
Having leftover material, and wanting to keep extra busy during the Covid summer, she decided to make new works in the same general style, though not as large, and that’s given rise to “Strata.” I have seen “Ingenerare” and would say that the works of “Strata” hit us with the same forces, though on a more intimate level. The literally hard-edged constructions are inanimate, of course, but they come alive in an aggressive way. They and the mosaics may be static but they feel like they’re in motion. It’s almost banal to say they give off energy. As for the stratification, the artist says that our civilization, the human record, will itself become a layer someday, to be buried in its turn. If “Drawn and Quartered” is the past and “Affectus” is the present, “Strata” is the future, according to Wyne. This is where we’re headed.
“Three Series” by Sheila Wyne runs through Saturday (Nov. 28). Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. The IGCA, located at 427 D Street (279-1116), mandates face coverings and limits the number of visitors inside the gallery to a maximum of 12 at any one time. Additional information, photos of the current show, a virtual tour of the show, and a Q&A with the artist are available on the IGCA’s website (www.igcaalaska.org). The artist’s website (sheilawyne.com) offers still more information about her and her career.
