"I thought it was a good medium, but what a (pain) it was to work with," Eldemar said. "I was looking for something that would grab somebody's attention and make them say, 'Wow, I never imagined going there.'"

"Bra-Dazzler" was organized by Team Survivor Perseverance, a Juneau nonprofit group providing fitness programs to women affected by cancer. The installation is patterned after a similar exhibit by The Way To Wellness Women's Foundation (www.wtww.org), a California-based nonprofit organization founded to bring awareness to breast-cancer issues.

"The symbolism in the pieces that I'm seeing, the intensity of the work and the message in each piece is absolutely amazing," said Nicki Germain, director of Team Survivor Perseverance. "Most women live daily with a bra and it has a huge impact on our lives. To be able to put it forward, expose it and do it, in some cases, in very whimsical ways, I think it opens the door to talk about women's health issues."

Brian Wallace / Juneau Empire   Put on a good face: Patrick Ripp stands in front on his mixed-media, pointillist collage-portrait of family friend Jennifer Korb, a breast cancer survivor. Ripp made his piece out of cut-outs of bras from Victoria's Secret and JC Penney catalogs.The work will be displayed Oct. 6-28 at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum's "Bra-Dazzler" exhibit.

The piece took 21 hours to build. Hot glue, heavy-gauge wire and three kinds of polymers keep it together.

"You can see it's asymmetrical," Eldemar said. "Most of the guys say most women are asymmetrical, so that's OK. They even said that the left side is usually the bigger side of most women, so I had to go and rebuild a little bit on the right side."

Eldemar has another piece, "Distilled Spirits," made out of shards of an Absolut cranberry bottle, spiked into Styrofoam with a translucent bridal veil as the backdrop. The work rests on an old refrigerator rack.

Guest juror Cathy Muñoz will judge the more than 40 pieces in "Bra-Dazzled" sometime before it opens at 4:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6, at the museum. The show runs through Oct. 28.

"Women should be proud of the fact that we have such unique bodies, and bras are a very female-specific, very intimate necessity to our lives," said Holly Menzies, who painted the pastel "Self-Portrait." "It's been a long time since I lived in Juneau, and it's very liberal in some ways, but very conservative in some ways. I just think it's fun to maybe shock or be quite bold or playful and fun, and I'm really excited to see the results."

Brian Wallace / Juneau Empire   Prickly: Juneau artist Stacy Eldemar stands next to her "Bra-Dazzler" piece titled "DD Kooshdebra."

Bartlett Regional Hospital opened its Infusion Center three years ago, allowing women to stay in town and receive chemotherapy. They must still travel Outside for radiation.

"I've had patients, friends, relatives, acquaintances (who have fought cancer)," said Iola Young, who made the interactive piece, "Accessories for the Modern Woman," with her friend, Noelle Derse. "I'm in my mid-50s, when you really start seeing the incidence of breast cancer start to rise."

"I've always been interested in breast cancer awareness, because I think it's something that needs to get as much attention as it can," said Mandy Holland, who wrote and built the framed bead-poem, "Underneath It All."

Patrick Ripp, Eldemar's significant other, has created a mixed-media, pointillist collage-portrait of family friend Jennifer Korb, a breast cancer survivor and a Juneau resident in the mid-1990s. Ripp recreated a shoulders-up photograph of Korb using more than 300 cut-out bras from Victoria's Secret and J.C. Penney catalogs.

He cut out bras for weeks, sorting out the darkest darks and the lightest hues into sections of a tacklebox to build a color palette.

"One of the things I learned about bras, they don't make a lot of greens," Ripp said. "I wanted more greens for shadows for the cheeks and the hairlines, and they just weren't available. There were a lot of fuchsias and pinks, so I chose that as highlight color for the cheeks and nose."

Five student pieces from a project in Sitka High School's 2005-2006 costuming and textile design class will hang on mannequins in storefronts around town: The Plum Tree, Nugget Mall; Skeins Fine Yarns, Airport Shopping Center; Shoefly, 245 Marine Way; and Lisa Davidson's Boutique, 117 Seward St.

The project began when teacher Gaylen Needham of Sitka showed her nine students an "ArtBra" calendar made by The Way to Women's Wellness Foundation.

"They saw that calendar and there was no turning back," Needham said. "It was totally a student-driven project. They just loved the idea of doing something that was a little bit on the edge, but also the whole idea of drawing attention to breast cancer."

Needham even had two boys in the class who decided to make bras. She bought them bras at the White Elephant thrift store to use as templates.

The nine finished bras hung in The Back Door Cafe for a month, then moved to the clothing store Curves for another two.

"It was kind of unique and something no one else had really done," said Sitka junior Logan Hawk, 16, who made "Goddess of Flowers." "They were hard to design, and then it was hard to sew things into it. It's just hard material, and with the elastic, you have to take into consideration what you're going to put on there so it would be able to stretch."

Deb Craig, a Team Survivor Perseverance running team member, created four pieces - "Bridget Jones Locker," an underwater-aquarium piece with apologies to Davy Jones; "Really Love Your Peaches Want to Shake Your Tree," a planter piece inspired by The Steve Miller Band; a red frilly bra that evolved into a Christmas decoration; and two black cats, a work devoted to her former cat, Mr. Bill, and her current pet, Houdini.

"I just literally picked up these bras and saw the pieces emerge," Craig said

"The exhibit is really a statement of how many of us have been touched by breast cancer in a variety of ways," she said. "We're either survivors ourselves, or our moms, our dads, our children and our friends have been affected."