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FAIRBANKS - In a culture seemingly obsessed with TV, Tivo and video games, it can be refreshing to note there are some people and some organizations that overlook such obsessions and strive to promote artistic expression. One such organization is the Rasmuson Foundation, which recently awarded $58,917 in grants through its Arts and Culture Initiative. It is the most recent award from a 10-year, $20 million investment meant to increase the impact of arts in Alaska, according to the Foundation.

Two of the 12 artists who received grants are from the Interior - Sheryl Maree Reily of Ester and Margo Klass of Fairbanks. The grants were awarded based on acceptance of grant applications from the artists, who had to describe proposed projects. Both women proposed works that would reveal personal expressions about Alaska, using very different media and very different points of view: Reily is a 27-year veteran of Alaska and will express her impressions from nearly three decades of rumination; Klass has been in the state just four years and will share the discoveries she's made in that time.

Sheryl Maree Reily

A New Zealand native and artist, Reily is just starting to express her impressions of Alaska through her art. Her current project, a three-piece, mixed-media exhibit, expresses the "Alaska experience through my filter," she said.

"It is interesting to me that I'm starting to produce work about Alaska. That is a first for me," she said of the work that earned her a portion of the $58,917 grant from the Rasmuson Foundation. "It has been percolating in my head for the past few years. I've seen this happen with artists before. You have to live with something for awhile before you can process and express it."

In her application to the Rasmuson Foundation, Reily described the Alaska experience as "innovative, adaptable and opportunistic." Alaskans, she said, "have learned to integrate discarded and useful objects into daily life." That characteristic served as inspiration for her project, which uses recycled material; the act of recycling, she explained, is "true to the spirit of the last frontier."

"I always work with a lot of recycled materials, and work on a kind of kitsch," she said, adding she is exploring the concept of "Alaskana," what she called a cliché expression of culture, such as Mexicana.

Reily started collecting materials for this project about a year ago, and she's been fine tuning the concept in her head for months. She said she spent a lot of time researching at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, making sketches and taking notes about the various Alaska-related displays and artwork. Reily plans to bring together that research, found objects from everyday life and a personal set of souvenirs and trophies - "a mashing of memories and matter collected over almost three decades of living in Alaska," she said in her artist statement - to create her masterpiece.

Reily, who now lives in Ester, is no stranger to the local art scene. She often displays work in various galleries in the Fairbanks area, and is excited to display this work, expected to be entitled "Progressions," in the Annex Gallery in August 2009. It will also be displayed in the Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center in the spring of 2010 and the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer in the summer of 2010.

Proud to have earned the sought-after grant, Reily said the Rasmuson program is valuable on a number of levels. First, the emotional and economic support is necessary and rewarding for an artist, she said. The foundation also has "really put us on the map nationally" with an exchange program for Alaska and Outside artists, she said. Finally, the program works to highlight the economic impact that art has on communities.

Margo Klass

"I'm absolutely thrilled and excited," Klass said of her recent grant award from the Rasmuson Foundation.

Klass was previously an art educator and artist in the Washington, D.C., area. During her time here, she has been captivated by the landscape and natural environment, and will incorporate her fascination into a sculptural exhibit she is calling "the Alaska Book of Hours."

"People get confused because of the name, but it is not a book at all," she said, explaining the "Book of Hours" is a reference to a medieval series of liturgical readings that focuses on the passage of time and the internalizing of time and place.

Klass' project will be a series of works based on the Alaska landscape, which she called magnificent, harsh and expansive, throughout each season. Using box constructions that "contain sculptural compositions of found, natural and fabricated objects," she will create eight major works: One for each of the four seasons, and one for each transition between seasons, so she will depict winter, winter-to-spring, spring, spring-to-summer, and so on.

"I am concentrating on the Interior, so it will be revealing the environment and habitat in which I live," she said. "I hope to capture the spiritual essence of sounds, light, growth, and all that is going on."

Her intent, as she described in her artist statement, is to create a contemporary counterpart to the "Book of Hours." She will depict "the heavy absence of light and flatness of space in winter, the incessant light and open spaces of summer, and the drama of changes between the two extremes."

Having only been in the state for four years, Alaska is "a brand new place for me," Klass said, and she loves it.