Last summer, local artists Kori Blakely and Meg Kelley heard there was a small space for rent on D Street adjacent to the Bubbly Mermaid and Cyrano’s. Blakely and Kelley had never run a gallery before, but saw an opportunity to showcase their work and that of other local artists. They put together a team of five artists, with space in the gallery for a rotating visiting artist.
Just a few months after Blakely and Kelley found the space, Uptown Artists has raised the bar for quality art downtown while creating a unique venue in which artists can sell their products without usurious commissions to the gallery owner. As a result of the cooperative business model, in which artists share the price of rent and earn 100 percent of product proceeds, the art is also more affordable for local residents. Unlike many of the other high-priced, frequently kitschy galleries downtown that market to summer tourists, Uptown Artists offers high quality art for locals to buy at reasonable prices.
Elly Maurer’s photographs, printed on aluminum, are at least as stunning as Anchorage’s other best landscapes. She depicts a remarkably wide range of subjects, from Mt. Huntington’s frigid north face to fish thrashing in a net as they’re hauled into a fishing boat. My favorite photo of hers depicts cottonwoods whose autumnal golds light up the room. Aluminum is an apt material on which to print Alaska photos. It adds luminosity and fidelity to landscapes of fall colors, snow spines, and the other phenomena that make our northern light so different and electric.
Allison King’s ink drawings have the emotional accuracy of social realism, the intricate patterns of moorish iconography, and the subject matter of our large corner of the continent: ravens, eagles, and so on. The synthesis of vivid forms, minute detail, and familiar subjects lends her prints a fantastical aura. That sensation is not limited to those who would buy original ink drawings or prints thereof (prints are very reasonably priced at around $12, perhaps the best quality art I’ve seen for sale in Anchorage at such a low price). King brings her otherworldly vision to children with a “Fantasy Art Coloring Book.” As a former connoisseur of coloring books, I wish I would have had one of hers when I was about five years old.
Kori Blakely also is a fine print maker, though her media is clothing as well as prints on paper. Her clothing screen prints are the most elegant depictions of our landscape that one could wear. Ascetic depictions of mountains have a few essential lines, conveying the spare majesty of our winter landscape. Her wolf bounding onto a vole is as playful and real an image as you’d find in a painting, much less on a shirt. Equally remarkable, these handmade screen prints—she produces them at Anchorage Community Works in Ship Creek—are very affordable, no more costly than the machine made stuff you might find at a local brewpub. Blakely also paints and applies her art to prints. An octopus painting is particularly notable—the creature lurks, suspended, in a corner of the canvas, as if the viewer is an ocean-going creature who is about to be devoured.
If Blakely straddles the line dividing “fine” from wearable art, Meg Kelley is fully in the realm of “useful.” Her embroidered hats with sewn brims are functional, and she also produces jewelry (In the interest of never arguing about the utility of jewelry, let’s just say anything you can wear is useful). The embroidery is colorful and tasteful, but what sets the hats apart is their brims, which are sewn in the style of a baseball cap but with far more creativity. The top side is monochromatic, while the underside of the brims are adorned with a wide variety of fanciful imagery from found fabrics, ranging from Star Wars to salmon.
Uptown Artists has only been open since November, but it already experiences large crowds on First Fridays and for special events, another of which it will host on the evening of Valentine’s Day. The artists regularly host live music for First Friday, and unlike other galleries, Uptown is open in the evenings. In fact, it is open whenever the Bubbly Mermaid is open, which aligns far more closely with most people’s schedule than the daytime hours of most other downtown galleries. If you’re downtown, you should stop by and pick up an exquisite print for just about the price of a glass of champagne.
Resource: http://www.anchoragepress.com
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