FAIRBANKS — Sheryl Maree Reily knew from a young age that she was going to be an artist. When she was little, growing up in New Zealand, she would pick fruit off of trees and scratch little drawings into their skins.

But nursing became her career. In 1981 she moved from New Zealand to Fairbanks to work as a registered nurse, a career that lasted 20 years.

She began to focus on photography in retirement, but that interest has morphed into other, more tactile, forms of art. She has had multiple shows over the last few years, the most recent being August 2009 at The Annex in Ester. But, she admitted, that despite 30 years of life in Alaska, only recently had she started to consider the possibilities of using Alaska as a subject for her artwork.

But with her latest solo exhibition, “Restorations,” opening Sept. 3 at the Anchorage Museum, all of the works relate to Alaska and the changing relationship of people and their resources.

Many of the pieces in the exhibition explore the relationship of taking something from the past that is no longer used and turning it into something that has value. With the exception of a few small things, all of the work in her show is made from recycled materials.

“Your like an anthropologist,” said Reily, who lives in Ester. “(These things) have had another purpose. You’re restoring it.”

When she first though about the exhibition, she wanted to explore what it meant to live in Alaska for 30 years — but with a kitsch bent to it. To her, the traditional iconography included the painted gold pans and cheap Alaska Native art knock-offs made in China.

But as she put the show together, it morphed into something else. She decided it would represent more contemporary iconography that outsiders might not think of.

“You take the materials and the ideas play back and forth and you end up with something,” she said.

Blue tarps were one of those things, and the material that inspired “Caribou Skies Hunting Blanket” is a 6-by-8 foot tarp that has a caribou-cameo quilt pattern.

“Everyone covers things with them (tarps),” she said. “It’s something that resonates as Alaskan.”

As she began to explore the less-kitschy elements of Alaska iconography, the exhibition began to take on a more serious tone.

This includes computer monitors stacked like a totem pole, with semi-transparent ravens, fish and caribou painted on the large monitors.

Computers were not something she thought she would use initially. But she was inspired after stumbling upon a pallet of old monitors someone had collected and stored in a field.

“It was very sculptural,” she said.

The monitors also play into her piece titled “The Unknown 21st Century Family,” modeled after the bronze sculpture of “The Unknown First Family” in downtown Fairbanks.

Her “family” is made out of recycled plastic bags that resemble traditional seal gut parkas. They are suspended, almost ghostlike, over a sculpture of computers arranged to look like a chunks of ice. There are even two “Malemute” dogs, made of recycled computer monitors. The dogs’ faces are a video of a dog.

The installation is located on the third floor of the museum, in front of large windows with full views of the Chugach mountains, creating a striking set of contradictions.

“It’s sort of a projection into the future,” she said. “What are we going to survive on?”

That theme plays into “Harvest Rosary.” She and her husband used to commercial fish near Egegik and had leftover foam floats that reminded her of beads. She dipped them in wax and strung them together to create a giant rosary, complete with an Exxon logo cruciform. She said the instillation — which takes up two walls — reflects both the religious aspects of fishing (“You pray you don’t get killed, that your catch is good,” she said) and how industry can become close to life.

“It shows how major industries bump up against each other,” she said. “There can be tragedy if we aren’t responsible.”

Ultimately, she is not worried about people being offended by her work. “I really hope people can reflect upon what it means.”

The exhibit runs through Oct. 10.

Contact features writer Suzanna Caldwell at 459-7504.