Tidelands

Anchorage Design Week / Anchorage Museum

TEAM: Petra Saddler Smith, Buck Walsky, Karen Larsen

Anchorage has high tidal swings and a muddy beach, preventing Alaska’s largest city from interacting with the ocean, though it’s a huge part of our lives. Tidelands creates a connection to the water and provides a chance to reflect on and observe our tidal interface. This temporary art installation was up for one month.

Alaska Design Forum

Step Up was apart of The Berth, site specific installations and intervention in downtown Anchorage in the month of September in 2009. A wire sculpture was suspended across a public alley. On the side walk, a spray-chalked “step up” asked passers-by to rise to the challenge.

Snowdrifts

Freeze Project, Anchorage

4-LETTER WORD: Mary Ellen Read, Karen Larsen

FREEZE celebrated Alaska and life in the North. In January 2009, artists, architects and designers from Alaska and around the world came together to create large-scale outdoor installations in downtown Anchorage using snow, ice and light—distinctly northern elements. While participants were organized, into “teams”, this was not a competition, but rather collaboration between individuals and disciplines and a sharing of ideas and perspectives. Snowdrifts was the piece created by Creative Space and Northern Front. Snowdrifts blanket and conceal, enclose you in a quietness, an awareness of the mass each snowflake carries as it covers a landscape. Ice formed by pressure, snowflakes accumulating, exploring what is revealed when the snow melts. Blows away, clears and uncovers — tunneling to the center, discovering what is buried beneath.

Step Up

Birth Project, Anchorage

Step Up was apart of The Berth, site specific installations and intervention in downtown Anchorage in the month of September in 2009. A wire sculpture was suspended across a public alley. On the side walk, a spray-chalked “step up” asked passers-by to rise to the challenge.