Photos of women dominate the solo show at the Alaska Native Art Foundation gallery. Twelve large pictures in two neat rows portraying a variety of moods, temperaments and face types: brunette, blonde, pale, swarthy, in warrior princess braids and tomboy baseball cap.
You could look all day and not realize that every picture is of the same woman, the photographer, Erica Lord.
"They're not photoshopped," Lord said. "I just used cheap drugstore makeup tricks."
In an artist's statement, Lord says that with the "Un/Defined Self-Portrait" series, "I attempt to challenge viewers' perceptions of what 'Native' looks like as well as demonstrate the flexible or shifting space I identify with as a mixed-race Alaska Native."
Ethnic ambiguity, adapting to the ever-changing environment of racial assumptions, is a recurrent theme for the artist. She was born in Fairbanks in 1978 and, in her early years, lived in Nenana. Her grandparents, Edmund and Nora Lord, were active in the Alaska Native land claims movement.
Then she moved to Michigan, home of her non-Native mother's mostly-Finnish family, and her world changed.
"Here I was considered a white baby by my relatives," said Lord, who has jet black hair and glacier gray eyes. "In Michigan, I was an Indian."
The matter was complicated there because of hunting and fishing conflicts between whites and Natives. "There were people wearing T-shirts that said 'Kill an Indian, save a fish.' It pushed me toward political involvement."
In 1998, she enrolled at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a self-designed study program focusing on Alaska Native art, history and culture. But she determined that she was not "interested in reproducing old things."
"They didn't speak to my contemporary life," she said. "So I started using (artifact objects) as props in photos."
She moved on to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where she majored in sculpture and poetry and had ample opportunity to investigate the school's archive of photos and Native art. Again she felt dissatisfied. "The majority of the images were dated in the past."
She next went to Carleton College in Minnesota. She had a successful stint at the elite university and earned her bachelor's degree in Studio Arts. But after Fairbanks and Santa Fe, the experience was somewhat unsettling because, "I was the only Native student at Carleton."
She earned her master's degree in fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, learning the ropes of videography and increasingly using the camera to document her work.
Over the course of her education and artistic exploration, Lord has built a long resume of awards, fellowships, performances, talks, presentations, committee and board work, screenings and exhibitions connecting venues from California to New York, Havana, Paris and the Venice Biennale.
Lord may be the world's most famous Alaska artist that Alaska art lovers have never heard of. The exhibit at the ANAF gallery is her first solo show in Alaska.
After various instructional posts in the lower 48, most recently as a visiting professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, she moved back to Fairbanks with no immediate prospects aside from "floating around."
But she has plans, like reprising in Fairbanks a performance art piece she did at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian last year. In "Artifact Piece, Revisited" -- itself a reprisal of a much-publicized piece by performance artist James Luna, mounted with Luna's approval and cooperation -- Lord reclined among objects on display as if she herself were a museum specimen.
The museum had to hire two guards before it ended, she said. "People kept touching me."
For that piece, as with the "Un/Defined" portraits and the other photos seen at ANAF, her subject is her own body.
"Enrollment Number," for instance, shows her segmented arm, one chunk of which, about 25 percent of the total, shows an apparent tattoo of her Bureau of Indian Affairs identification number.
"I get frustrated with blood quantum issues," she said. Her scrambled lineage -- Athabascan, Inupiaq, Finnish, Swedish, English and Japanese -- works out to a 5/16ths blood quantum for her, as the BIA measures such things.
The declining number of full-blood Native Americans coupled with the rising number of people with some Native blood, at least in Alaska, is reshaping the identity politics of the past, she suggested.
"It's much more complicated to talk about now," she said. "We used to be 'half-breeds.' Now we're 'mixed ethnicity.' People say, 'You don't look Native.' What does that mean?"
Lord pointed to the wall of self-portraits. "This is what 'Native' looks like now."
Physicality takes a different turn in a more recent series in which she applied tape to her body to spell words. After tanning heavily, she removed the tape and photographed the inscribed pieces of anatomy. Her chest is emblazoned with "Halfbreed." and "Colonize me" runs along her thigh.
"I figured that since skin is the issue, I might as well make it the medium," she said with a chuckle.
Another series, "Trash Totems," shows her in silhouette piling oil drums and used tires one atop another. "People associate all Native Alaskans with totem poles," she said. "And what's on every Alaskan's mind right now is petroleum."
To get the photos, she snuck into junk yards at night, constructed the 12-to-14-foot-tall totems, then took the photos "as evidence."
The pieces on exhibit do not dazzle as photographs and are not intended to. They could be described as stock, standard or neutral.
But Lord said that being a "technical photographer" is not her intent. Instead she wants the photos to communicate something beyond the images.
"I still don't call myself a photographer," she said. "I'm more like a performance artist, reluctantly performing for the camera.
"The idea is what's most important to me."
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com