Through her mixed-media painting and sculpture, Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of an ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity. Her images are a combination of shared iconography and intensely personal imagery. She uses synthetic, organic, traditional, and modern materials to examine cultural traditions and to question accepted notions of beauty.

Skin is a recurring theme in Kelliher-Combs’ work, for which she has developed a distinctive style. She creates the stretched “skin” surface of her “paintings” through the application of thick layers of acrylic polymer or polyurethane. These layers are built up slowly and embedded with scraps of clothing, hair, fur, walrus stomach, and other found materials. Kelliher-Combs pigments the layers with colors and pockmarks them with circular pores, spiral eddies, and beaded loops that imbue the surface of the “skin” with what she describes as “secrets.” Kelliher-Combs says her interest is in the nature of secrets, not the content—and these secrets take many forms.

Galanin’s work is intended to confront cultural issues —especially as they relate to appropriation, categorization, economics, cultural identity, and representation. Born in Sitka, Galanin has lived, traveled, and worked all over the world. He has extensive training in traditional, as well as contemporary approaches to art, pursuing both on parallel paths. His work simultaneously preserves his culture and explores new conceptual territory.

Galanin comes from a long line of Northwest Coast artists, starting with his great-grandfather, who sculpted in wood; down through his father, who works in precious metal and stone; to Galanin, who received his BFA in silversmithing and jewelry design. Now, concept determines Galanin's choice of medium, and he presents visual experiences to inspire constructive dialogue with viewers. Valuing his culture as highly as his individuality, Galanin is known for navigating the politics of cultural representation as he balances both ends of the aesthetic spectrum.

Through his artwork, Mehner looks to define himself in the time and space that he lives. Born in Fairbanks to a Tlingit/N'ishga mother and a Caucasian father, Mehner’s artwork examines his multicultural heritage and the accompanying social expectations and definitions. Mehner was raised in two Alaskan environments: as an urban Native in Anchorage, and what he describes as a “rural hippie” in Fairbanks, living without electricity, running water, or phone. From these perspectives, he has studied the constructs of Native American identity and his life inside and outside of them. Having grown up with the trappings of the urban Indian experience— such as poverty, alcoholism, and abuse—Mehner used his early work to process his childhood.

The work in this exhibition, Finding My Song, is presented in three sections. Mehner draws upon his family’s stories to take a personal look at the retention and reclamation of language.

Silook is a writer, carver, and sculptor who has contributed a significant body of work to indigenous art that critiques the legacies of colonization in the Arctic and the ongoing violence against women in rural and urban communities in Alaska and elsewhere. The ancestral walrus-tusk ivory dolls of St. Lawrence Island, traditionally carved by men, are the basis of her work. Silook also departs from tradition by depicting women in her carvings rather than the animals most commonly rendered by men.

As one of the first female carvers to gain critical acclaim in a male-dominated field, Silook has used this platform to issue powerful statements. She has defied constructions both by her medium of carving and by the choice of her contemporary and pertinent subject matter. Silook often chooses to use her own biography of abuse and recovery as her artistic inspiration and to visualize and verbalize the silence surrounding the sexual abuse of Native women.