Artist Sean Derry will debut his exhibit “From Always Until Now” this Friday, March 7 at Bunnell Street Arts Center. The exhibit consists of freestanding assemblages collected and curated from objects found while Derry deconstructed a Kachemak Bay homesteading cabin over two summers. According to a press release, he has “transformed the artifacts and building materials harvested from the cabin into a body of artwork that utilizes the erasure of the cabin as a process from which to explore decolonizing Alaska.”

Derry was born and raised in Homer and remembers designing and building forts as a youth. He dreamed of one day building a cabin across the bay to call his own and living a subsistent lifestyle of fishing and farming. Later on, he became involved in the local pottery community, inspiring him to pursue an interest in the arts.

“I had an opportunity to take a pottery class with Jack Walsh and then later worked with Dan Bartos at the high school. That kind of instilled a lifelong interest in making,” said Derry in an interview on Friday. “I think growing up in Homer, having a chance to be around the potter community, was super influential and transformative.”

Derry later went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts from Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Through this project Sean strives to better understand his family’s role in altering Alaska, and he is driven to contribute to ongoing efforts to diminish cultural conflict and environmental damage.

According to the press release, Derry’s maternal side of the family arrived in Alaska via steamship in the late 19th century. They did not find gold as they hoped but they eventually opened a grocery store, started a lighterage business, grew a reindeer herd and established a photography studio.

The 79-acre site of the cabin was claimed after WWII with special veteran provisions in a revision to the 1862 Homestead Act. In 1959, Alaska was proclaimed a state and around this time the cabin was floated on a steel barge to its final location, across the bay. The cabin was first occupied by a fisherman and later a schoolteacher as well as a biologist and workers trying to remediate the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

“None of my family lived in the cabin,” said Derry on Friday. “But it felt like they potentially could have and so that was kind of an opportunity to spend a little more time dissecting my own family history and kind of wrestling with how stories are passed down through generations.

“I think there’s sort of a history within art of erasing things,” Derry pointed out. “There’s a famous piece, ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing,’ and I was interested in that sort of erasure. But, also, just the simple act of spending time with the structure and the contents of it, dissecting it as a way to try and understand it. It was never just about eliminating it. It was about doing it in a way that hopefully carried some meaning.”

Derry believes that the key to this idea is accepting the knowledge already present in a location and remaining mindful of how one’s presence alters the identity of a place. He hopes that erasure of the cabin can exist as both an open investigation and an apology.

Two years after Sean pulled the first nail from the cabin, all that remained of the structure was “a plywood floor and rusty wood-fired cookstove.”

Derry currently divides his time between western Pennsylvania and Southcentral Alaska. He currently serves as the area head of sculpture at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Derry’s exhibit at Bunnell Street Arts Center will be featured March 7 to April 2. An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 7, beginning at 5, with an artist talk at 6.

You can learn more about the process of erasing the cabin on Derry’s Instagram, @sean_derry.

Reach reporter Chloe Pleznac at chloe.pleznac@homernews.com.