Anchorage-based Sophia Street was the featured musician at this year’s Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities. She’s a singer-songwriter who plays ukulele and digitally loops her vocals during live performances.
While they were in Juneau, she and musician James Goodreau dropped into KTOO’s arts room to play a Red Carpet Concert.
It’s a rainy Saturday morning and Mercedes Muñoz is working over a crackling fire pit outside her Starr Hill home.
“I cut a bunch of 4-by-4 cubes and right now I’m torching them, putting them over a fire,” she says. “And then I’m going to go back and sand them down, get them all polished up and then cut a keyhole mount in the back so that each tumbler will have its own little pedestal to sit on, on the wall. It ended up being maybe just as big of a project as making the work.”
She mounts the custom blocks all over the gallery walls of The Canvas. There’s one to display each of her tumblers, bowls, mugs and tea pots. Over the past few months, she’s created more than 140 functional ceramics for her show “Good Continuation” at The Canvas, which opens tonight. It’s her second professional show after almost a year as the ceramics studio manager.
The entire project is four months in the making. It’s the product of evenings, lunch breaks and weekends throwing, firing, glazing and creating her intricate designs.
Her pottery features a technique called Mishima that allows her to etch fine dark lines onto the surface of her porcelain pieces, marrying her background in drawing and illustration with organic three-dimensional forms. The lines tangle and twist into repetitive geometric patterns, which break up her creamy pastel glazes. Metallic gold accents punctuate the designs.
One was inspired by her grandmother, the late Alaskan artist Rie Muñoz.
“On this teapot, I have a bit of cross-hatching that’s actually a technique that Rie used. If you look at the backgrounds of a lot of landscapes she had watercolor washes, but underneath it, she had pen drawings, and they had this exact cross-hatching technique,” she says.
Her exhibition isn’t the only deadline she’s working toward. She’s also making 90 handcrafted plates that The Canvas is giving to guests at its annual fundraising dinner.
Last year, Brandon Howard was sweating over the plates when he was in Mercedes’s role.
“Just to put this in perspective, each plate requires 6 pounds of clay to start with. That’s 500 pounds of clay that Mercedes manhandled into plates. And if you’ve ever meet Mercedes Muñoz she’s not this big, buff lady. She’s slight but she’s a powerhouse. She was in there and she was cranking out 25 plates a day like it was nothing,” said Howard.
Muñoz made the plates with a little help on the sepia-toned design reproduced on each one.
“The artist is Joanne Sam and she did a beautiful image of a bunch of little figures and they have these really expressive eyebrows and eyes, big smiles and it just covers the entire center of the plate,” says Muñoz.
She also teaches ceramics to adults with developmental disabilities, community wheel-throwing classes and home school students.
Brandon Howard, who is now the artistic coordinator at The Canvas, says she’s an amazing teacher.
“People learn a lot and they learn quickly taking a class from Mercedes. Those organizational skills lend themselves really well when it comes to handing out information in a clear, succinct way to her students,” Howard says.
Muñoz says her grandmother encouraged and inspired her to pursue the arts.
“From when I was a little kid and making horrible little drawings and she acted like it was the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. I see a lot of people who say that they can’t create anything. ‘Oh I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t do this,’ and I think that’s a shame and I feel like that starts when kids are young and don’t have the encouragement. So that’s something I always try to do whether it’s adults I’m teaching or kids, I want everybody to feel like they can create, because they can. It’s just practice.”
With more than 200 new pieces, the practice shows.
A collection of oil paintings are being shown at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. The exhibit is the result of two years of work by multimedia artist Jacob Higgins.
When Jacob Higgins’ show opened in early January, he aired it with music by Mozart.
“I want an art experience — a painting exhibit to feel relaxing, even if the painting themselves, the images, are not relaxed,” he said. “The person needs to be so they can take in what they are looking at.”
But for my tour, he recommends a song from the soundtrack of the movie “Birdman” called “The Anxious Battle for Sanity.” It opens with rolling jazz percussion, punctuated with crashing cymbals and abrupt silences.
An angry white clown smokes a cigarette on a patio with some bohemian Europeans in all black, an ox carcass hangs in a shed, wood pilings weather on a beach, a naked woman reclines on a bear — these are some of the 29 oil paintings in the gallery.
“As I’m creating an exhibit I want there to be a sense of–you move through chapters and you’re involved in a greater idea by the virtue of a collection of things put together,” he said.
His painting “Red Pears and Pork Hearts” is a good place to start.
“If you look at a still life of a basket, of a bowl of fruit, those things are actually on people’s tables. Pears and raw pork hearts leaning together — you don’t see that. And that’s where this elevates to an idea of a bit of the bounty and abundance, but also a bit of a tension, an attraction-aversion. And that piece, why I chose it for the show poster, was I feel like it really sums up the concept of the show overall,” said Higgins.
This is Higgins’ seventh solo show, and while he is a multimedia artist, all 29 paintings are in oil. Beyond bounty and abundance, Higgins’ work evokes something more visceral.
“One of the reasons people may find it grotesque to see flesh, meat, blood, those sorts of things, is because we all have an inherent sense of our vulnerability as humans. We are meat. The ideas of how we harvest meat, to eat it, the way the we maybe callously hang it from hooks in a butcher shop, and then we so delicately cook it at a restaurant, that’s a very interesting thing when you consider the fact that we also anthropomorphize something like a hanging meat or a cow head—we see ourselves a bit even in an animal that has died,” said Higgins.
The exhibit is a result of an academic study where Higgins explored different styles like still life, landscape, narrative painting — and it shows as you move around the gallery. Next to “Red Pears and Pork Hearts” is a landscape of Southeast, seemingly without any symbolic images.
“Fly” is a 3-by-4-foot piece with a beach scene of a building-size fly on it. Spawning salmon spew out of its gut.
Down the wall is a piece called “Three Hands” that explores human volatility. Among other interpretations, the hands, which are gloved with hospital scrub-like sleeves, allude to surgery–when we are most vulnerable. While they are trying to help, they may hurt, like the sting of a yellow jacket.
Higgins is taking chances with his work.
“You cannot create something new without having it sort of rub people the wrong way — some people. And you have to, just sort of be OK with that, you have to be at peace with the fact that you’re not gonna please everybody, and if you do, if you try to please everybody, you’re going to be greatly disappointed because it just does not work that way,” said Higgins.
Whether people like his work or not, Higgins is proud of it.
“As far as I am concerned, my artwork does not look like any other artwork I’ve seen. It has elements of other artwork. It has elements of Southeast Alaskan painting, it has elements of art history, some of my work even has elements of pop culture, but I feel that it’s truly my own voice,” said Higgins.
It would be impossible to sum up all of Higgins work in a short radio piece. Check out his work yourself. It will be up through the weekend in the JACC gallery.
As many of us sought to honor David Bowie‘s passing through Facebook posts, photographs and a very impromptu memorial at The Taqueria this afternoon, a group of folks from Juneau and Seattle had already reimagined one of our favorite singles.
Back in May, Alaska Robotics‘ Pat Race, Molly Lewis, Marian Call, and Seth Boyer were already working on a tribute, composing a parody of the 1969 classic “Space Oddity” using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. But they didn’t stop there. The group filmed shot-for-shot a music video inspired by the original.
The video made internet rounds and eventually reached the man himself, earning a shout out on Bowie’s personal website.
There really isn’t any electronic music at the Alaska Folk Festival, but now there’s a little Folk Fest in a Southeast duo’s electronic music.
Whiskey Class is debuting their first music video here.
Liz Snyder and Patrick Troll came up with the name Whiskey Class when filling out their application for the 2012 Alaska Folk Festival.
“Whiskey Class was a good name because it’s like one of those punny band names,” Troll. “You know like, whiskey glass is a thing, but if you change one letter — whiskey class. It’s this whole thing about being a responsible drunk. Be classy with it, even when you’re drinking whiskey.”
After their acoustic set at Folk Fest, the pair began incorporating layered vocals, drum loops and ambient tones, entering the colorful world of electronic music.
Before they were Whiskey Class, they were teenage musicians from rival Southeast Alaska high schools. They found each other’s music in the early days of social media through MySpace. They still live apart, but make music together.
They’re both musicians in their own rights. Snyder is half of the Juneau folk rock duo the Wool Pullers, and Troll creates beats as Ketchikan’s DJALTERNATIVE. Living in different places forces them to collaborate over weekend-long recording sessions. Often it starts with Troll’s beats and Snyder freestyling over them.
“Sometimes it’s a beat, sometimes we’re just sitting around just messing around with something and I’m like, ‘Let’s record that.’ Then you loop it, put drums over it. And then I force Liz to be a diva,” said Troll.
After their marathon recording sessions, Troll will edit and continue to polish the raw audio over weeks and months. Their new music video for the song “Thurt” is two years in the making.
Snyder visited Troll when he was living in California’s Humboldt County. Troll reached out to friend and visual artist Ian Stewart, who had been experimenting with green screens and digital animation. With cameras rolling, Whiskey Class turned him loose to direct and shoot their first music video.
“We had just finished the track, like, five minutes prior, so it was kinda fun to lip-sync to a song I didn’t really know,” said Snyder.
The finished product is a psychedelic journey with cartoon versions of the band drifting through Alaska landscapes and outer space, with a host of other random scenarios and subtle drug references.
“You know, seeing yourself animated and, like, waiting so long, it was like this epic moment. And I’m just watching it on my iPhone. And I text him and I’m like, ‘You are insane’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, sorry it took so long, sorry it took two years.’ But that’s kind of how our music worked,” said Troll.
In addition to the video, the band dropped a new single this week, the jazzy and dream-like “Juice Man.”
One of their songs was featured in 2014’s “The Breach,” a salmon conservation documentary alongside animation by his dad, Ray Troll.
Whiskey Class plans to release an EP this spring, sometime around Folk Fest. But, like their music, the deadline’s fluid.
In the near future, Santa Claus can no longer afford to stay at the North Pole, and with climate change, it’s not really that cold anymore. He’s outsourced his workshop to Pluto and his only hope to save Christmas lies with the U.S.S. Underdrive, which is sailing through the galaxy on a rescue mission.
If this sounds like a plot fit for a movie house, that’s because it is. This Saturday, Collette Costa’s infamous take on traditional holiday fare returns to The Gold Town. Her 6th Annual Christmas Bazaar Extravaganza is taking on a Star Trek theme, with captain Costa at the helm.
“We have all the kinda usual suspects. Our dancing girls, our dancing ladies, our dancing ukulele people, our dancing jugglers and some live music.
The idea was born out of her love for the old time television variety shows and a desire to bring Juneau her own.
“Donnie and Marie always had variety shows at Christmas and they were awesome and they had a bunch of dumb stuff,” Costa said. “They had some dancing and it was always completely nonsensical and unrelated and someone was always knocking on the door like, ‘Oh, I wonder who that could be,’ and it was Bing Crosby or something ridiculous.”
But the show isn’t all about the holidays. Since they’re visiting the planets, some of the acts will take on a cosmic focus, including an encounter with the inhabitants of Venus.
“There may be a couple Uranus jokes. But it’s nothing dirty. I mean, it’s as dirty as Uranus can be. And how dirty can that really be? I mean, it’s way out there. Most people can’t even see Uranus from where they’re sitting. So, it’s not a big deal.”
Like last year, the two Saturday performances are expected to sell out, and get increasingly loose as the night progresses.
“I like to stick to the things that are important to me at Christmas. Presents, cookies and a fat man in a red suit giving me stuff,” Costa said.
Costa says “Playboy Spaceman, Bridget and George, Kari and Jason and many, many, many others,” will be at the party.
Tickets to Costa’s 6th Annual Christmas Bazaar Extravaganza can be purchased at the Gold Town Nickelodeon website or at their box office.
