Koyukon Athabascan artist Janna Avner speaks of core childhood memories that shape her path as a creative: rose gold winter light on birchbark, an old plastic mirror that her dad would turn into a giant, bendable mouth, artist Colcord “Rusty” Huerlin’s pastel-colored landscapes hanging at her grandparents’ house, a little prism she liked to use as a lens for looking at the world. These experiences formed her first “introduction to seeing, observation…being a kid running around and playing with things around the house and just exploring pots and pans and cabinets, whatever.” Trained as a painter and currently creating immersive installations that often incorporate sculpture and digital art projection, Avner’s aesthetic and conceptual concerns are deeply influenced by her relationship to the phenomenon of light.

Raised in Los Angeles, Avner annually travels to interior Alaska to visit her mother’s family. Avner understands herself as “dislocated, but not in a pejorative way.” Artmaking has been a process of creating an authentic relationship to her heritage, her history, and her lived experience: “I think as a female Indigenous artist, you're always trying to carve out a space in which you can exist, in which you make sense, in which you have a voice.” She credits a class with Tlingit artist Da-ka-xeen Mehner at the Native Art Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as pivotal for normalizing mixed-race identity, introducing her to artists and theorists who helped shape her understanding of what was possible, such as Mehner’s own photographic self-portraits, Lucy Lippard’s multiheritage text “Mixed Blessings,” and the work of theorist Kumkum Sangari.

Avner’s late grandmother, Alaska legend Mary Jane Fate, is another source of inspiration, as a person who bridged worlds and forged a remarkable life. Fate was born in Rampart Village and was removed to the Mt. Edgecumbe Native boarding school in Southeast Alaska when she was fourteen years old. There, she helped care for the younger children, some of whom were as young as four or five. “She had boundless positivity in a way that was almost otherworldly, when you think about the transitions she had to go through in her life,” says Avner. Despite this early experience of extreme adversity, she managed to thrive, and, according to Avner, “in every situation she found a way to collaborate, to join, to start things, and to build.” Fate went on to become a lobbyist for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, co-founded the Tundra Times, was the first woman co-chair of the Alaska Federation of Natives, and served on the corporate board of Alaska Airlines, among many other accomplishments. Speaking of her over two-decades term on the Alaska Airlines board, Avner reflects, “being an Indigenous woman in a room full of suited men…that’s extraordinary. I think her social EQ and IQ were off-the-chart.”

It was Fate, her husband, and Avner’s mother, Janine, and her sisters, who taught Avner and her cousins how to live on the Yukon River. As a young person steeped in the urban environment of Los Angeles and its bright, sunny chaparral biome, these visits to the boreal forest were formative. She pondered unusual contrasts between the plants and the light, and she remembers wondering why the spruce forest in Alaska was a color she describes as “dark, dark, dark, dark green—year-round.” Reflecting on her upbringing, Avner says she has developed a sense of gratitude for the complexity of her mixed heritage. Through this perspective, Avner incorporates materials that represent both sides of her identity as well as materials that speak to the places where she was raised, with an emphasis on hybridity and fluidity.

Her current body of work began in 2020, shortly after her grandmother’s passing. She describes a moment of looking at the northern lights from her family’s home on Farmers Loop Road in Fairbanks. This ethereal encounter helped her answer questions she was grappling with in her grief about maintaining relationships with her memories, her past, and her grandmother’s spirit. “When I saw the lights, all those feelings sort of vanished. I came to this place of calm, this peace and presence of something greater than myself— almost like this somatic reality that's in all of us. It's felt in the body; we're all electrical conductors and made up of neurotransmitters. I really try to chase that feeling in my work, a feeling of awe.” Avner’s light-objects often become symbols of self, or even abstract portraits. Composed of heterogeneous materials and animated by light, shadow, and shifting colors, they reflect the fragmentary and fugitive nature of memory. The aurora borealis, as a phenomenon of displaced light, also serves as a metaphor for the artist’s exploration of identity and her experience of growing up at a physical distance from her ancestral homelands.

In addition to her work as an artist, Avner has cultivated a collaborative curatorial practice through her work on FEMMEBIT, which she co-founded in 2014 with digital artist Kate Parsons. FEMMEBIT is an artist organization and collective that presents programs, screenings, and exhibitions of video and new media work. It began as a platform to highlight Los Angeles-based female perspectives on internet culture at a time when there weren’t many female or queer-identifying artists in digital spaces, which Avner describes as “very STEM-influenced and male-dominated, and they basically still are.” She calls the artists she’s worked with through this collective courageous and experimental, capable of “creating their own homes in what I would consider to be a pretty inhospitable space for new and divergent voices.” Avner also finds strange parallels between these digital spaces and her experiences of the Alaskan wilderness—places that can be dangerous, “without a lot of rules or etiquette, frontier zones.” These linkages between what she refers to as “AFK and IRL,” (away from the keyboard and in real life), motivated her to dive further into writing and publishing about the substitutional reality of digital art, as well as mining her own personal experience for inspiration, creating a more fluid and organic approach to incorporating content and forms that may seem, at first blush, incongruous.

Avner likens her approach to that of poetry or glitch art, in which language or technology is appropriated to communicate complex thoughts and feelings inexpressible through straightforward prose or media. “When I make my work, I want to talk or think almost adjacently to what I make without directly disturbing its mysterious surface.” Avner’s practice is grounded in rigor, but also a deep respect for the wonderment she found peering through a small prism as a child or looking up at the northern lights on a winter’s night. She quotes the artist Eva Hesse, whose perspective on conceptual art has shaped Avner’s practice; Hesse said of her own work: “It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing.” Similarly, Avner tries to cultivate the sense of mystery, to think of her pieces “from an oblique angle; I try to feel before thinking so as to enter a space of infinite possibility.”