:: DOUBLE XX: SoNot Show at Bear Gallery in Pioneer Park, Fairbanks, Alaska

:: So...not, So...not, SoNot. So not what?

Ever since 2000, a group of Fairbanks artists have been making a joyful noise under the broad umbrella of SoNot. SoNot has been involved in performance pieces, short eclectic events that a few decades ago might have been called happenings--such as their Bizarre Bazaar, a send up of the Christmas arts bazaar. SoNot has extended its tentacles from Tok to Anchorage. Now SoNot has pulled together a wonderfully eclectic art show featuring fifty women artists.

So....what? SoNot's Double XX show at the Bear Gallery in the Pioneer Park Civic Center both is and is not.

It's not: What the person who's not been paying attention to Alaska art in the last decade might have missed. There is little conventionally representational art here. Heidi Hahn offers the only landscape, a dark, brooding piece with the metaphorical title "Mountain Womb." Saunders McNeill's untitled photography is the only work of straightforward portraiture.

It is: an elegantly curated show featuring a range of work from Mary Matthews' "Stick Dance," a strange cityscape formed by a juxtaposition of found scrap Styrofoam and natural materials such as bee's and hornet's nests, to more familiar abstract expressionist paintings by Robby Mohatt, Sandy Gillespie, Dale Fairbanks and Sue Farhnam.

But the emphasis is much more on the side of surprising constructions in all sorts of materials: Penny Wakefield's "Scene From Within" is a neatly excised wall of a house featuring what on first glance looks like a stained-glass window. But a closer look reveals the window to be made of died salmon skins and other materials. Barb Tudor's "Cube IV" looks like a stone block pilfered from an Aztec Temple. Susan Joy Share's "Fog and Flame" is made of stitched together book board painted on one side in a bold bright copper and on the other in a color field. Veronica Bennett's untitled hanging is a dynamic assemblage of glass and metal.

While the Double XX show is clearly a women's event, it wears its feminism lightly, often humorously. Sonya Kelliher-Combs offers a row of sewn pockets--wombs? pockets on aprons? mutant Christmas stocking? Kim Brown's "American Straight Jacket Dress" is a take off on women's wear and dress patterns, and Carolyn Strand's "Novices from Rumtek #2" is a jacket made of cyanotype photographs printed on cloth. Annie Duffy's "Corset 2003" is a wonderful understated white-on-white study.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Double XX is how well this great variety of art hangs together as a single show. The materials themselves range from fish skins, to what looks to be wire concrete reinforcement material, to fencing foils, to ten-penny nails and rail spikes, to plain old paint and clay. Entering the room, a visitor is welcomed by Rachel Dowdy's "Meeting Myself in the Wind," face-to-face heads with expressive carved wood faces, furry bodies that seem to be made from unraveled rope and sprouting horns like valkaries. Around every corner there are surprises of color and shape.

If there is any unifying principle to a show of this type, it's how remarkably diverse Alaskan art is at this moment, how refreshingly free it is from the expected norms. SoNot has built a cohort of practicing artists beginning in Fairbanks, but now radiating throughout the state. The Double XX show is only up at the Bear Gallery one more week. Surely it is worth going to see. Surely SoNot is ready to take this show on the road.