Color Me Lucky
article by Megan Crawford
images by Alexis Pike & Megan Crawford
©Megan Crawford
A purple banana seat bike, two friends, and a steep alleyway. For Alexis Pike, that was the beginning of Color Me Lucky.
At age 6, Alexis and a friend climbed on her new birthday bike and headed down an alleyway. As the alley got steeper, she peddled faster, flying toward the gravel on the other side of the road. Pike woke up to the sound of ambulance sirens. As the sirens faded, she realized that they weren’t for her. She got back on her bike and rode past her friend, who had gravel in her knees. In a haze of adrenaline and tunnel vision, she headed home for help.
“My mother was a pianist and would accompany opera singers— she was practicing, and I was afraid to interrupt. So I stood outside the door, kind of waiting, and then I finally knocked, and I said ‘I think I’ve hurt myself.’” She spent four days in the hospital with a fractured skull.
“I had to wear a motorcycle helmet when I rode my bike because they didn’t have bike helmets back then.” She managed to convince her dad that she needed a new bike, so she traded the purple banana seat bike for a stunt bike and Pike’s luck began to change.
©Alexis Pike
Risk, though, wasn’t just a one-time thing. There were micro and macro risks, emotional risks, and the less occasional physical risk, which she became a bit more cautious of after the fractured skull.
Color Me Lucky is Pike’s latest photography project, exploring desire, sexuality, masculinity, image, and risk that the 1970s daredevil, Evel Knievel, embodied. Born in Butte, Montana, Knievel represented what Pike set out to accomplish on her purple banana seat bike. Her artist statement points to the risk-taker in all of us and our want for “the momentum that carries you forward, even when you know there’s a train wreck ahead.”
©Alexis Pike
©Megan Crawford
Alexis grew up in Twin Falls as a sixth-generation Idahoan. She distinctly remembers seeing a wall of framed photographs in her father’s law office— all half-siblings that she didn’t know. But, even from a young age, she knew they were important because their pictures were framed. Those images molded her relationship with photography and her love of the snapshot. “It was about looking at photographs to establish my family tree,” she recalls. “When I went into making images, it was all about the influence of the snapshot and how that becomes our entrance into art as individuals… it’s something we can all relate to.”
Her interest in photography started at 19 with a Canonet from her father. She was enrolled at Boise State and had taken a few art classes, but her father suggested taking a photo class to learn how to use the new camera. Right out of the gate, Pike’s professor told her she wouldn’t be able to take the course with a Canonet since it lacked full manual control. “That’s fine; I didn’t want to take the class anyway.” She told her dad that she wouldn’t be able to take the class, so he asked what she would need. A friend took her to a pawn shop and found a Pentax MEF Super, “and the whole world opened up from there.”
©Alexis Pike
Now an associate professor of photography at Montana State University, Alexis’s desire to teach came from her college mentor who shifted her perspective. “I wanted to give back what I had received. I didn’t go to grad school to become an artist; I went to grad school to get the credentials to teach.” She taught kid’s art classes and worked in ceramics, painting, and photography while she was in undergrad, alongside running the color darkroom. As a graduate student, she taught continuing education classes. “I was always preparing that foundation to teach.”
But her journey to where she is now isn’t a straight line— she navigated an unstable career field, moved to Portland, bought a house on her own, and raised her son as a single mom. She taught at universities across Portland, working from job to job. She could have gone to law school and become a partner in her father’s law firm, but that’s not where her passion lied. “[I pursued] a career that does not pay well, that often does not have secure employment… [I was] waiting for the perfect job, being selective about where I was going to apply.” For Alexis, doing it on her own was empowering: “This is mine— I did this.”
©Alexis Pike
In 2015, while she was working on Color Me Lucky, Alexis adopted her two nieces and nephew, growing her family from two to five. The project then began to dig even deeper into personal risk— adopting three kids, dating again, and documenting a subject with a heavily male demographic, all as a middle-aged woman. “I knew that story was there, but I couldn’t figure out how to weave it in. How do you take something like Evel Knievel and daredevils and talk about being a middle-aged woman, and what goes with that?” The project became clearer with the help of a longtime friend and Portland-based photographer, Shawn Records. “He helped me take that story I wanted to tell about myself and my own risk-taking and weave it into the overall scheme.”
Another major turning point in the project was a photograph of a Spanky Jr. jump from Evel Knievel Days in Butte:
“I snuck behind the barrier to get inside so I’d be closer. I was photographing with a 50mm lens, so you really had to be close. I remember when the car launched I could feel the debris, and I was just terrified, you know— don’t break the camera. I had never taken a photo like that in my life, so it was totally foreign. I looked at the images and it was like “oh my god, I captured it, I got it.”
That image became a source of creative fuel for Color Me Lucky— it legitimized her ability to capture what was happening, to take the risk, to see herself in Evel Knievel’s jumps and wrecks, but to peddle faster down the steep alley anyway.
©Alexis Pike
A monograph of Color Me Lucky was printed by Savannah-based publisher Aint–Bad in March of 2019. Now that the project has come to fruition and Evel Knievel Days have temporarily ended in Butte, Alexis is working toward new projects, revisiting projects, and creating a new experimental darkroom class. She’s editing a project on the Oregon Trail called A Photographic Reconsideration of the Oregon Trail. “I’ve been photographing along the Oregon Trail for most of my photographic career, but a major part in the past 12 years. So I finally thought ‘okay, let’s just make this a project.’” She spent a summer traveling along the entire 2,000-mile route, from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon. The body of work looks at western migration alongside migration as a whole. “Why was it acceptable that we migrated west? Why is it not acceptable that people want to migrate north?”
She’s also been frequenting Liz Phair concerts in the west in pursuit of a new project. The project looks into “how long it takes to come into your strength as a female.” The influence started in her twenties, but has reemerged in her forties: “I have all of those screenshots, stories, and text messages— everything— from my dating app days [and] her album, Exile in Guyville, which influenced me so much as a female.”
Alongside new projects and being a mother of four, Pike added a new experimental color darkroom to her curriculum for the fall semester. She’s going back to her roots with the new class, back to her days of running her alma mater’s color darkroom, back to the time her days were filled with doubt. But, this jackalope-loving, camera wielding, kickass mother of four says of doubt: “recognize it, embrace it, and use it as rocket fuel.”
While some of her risks have morphed over the last few years, Pike’s risk-taking doesn’t end with Color Me Lucky. Working in a male-dominated sector, reconstructing a family dynamic, building a new class from the ground up, and inspiring other women to come into their own— all while being unapologetically and fiercely female— is a testament to her strength and willingness to just go for it.
For Alexis Pike, it’s time to don the leathers and take flight.
©Megan Crawford