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Inspired by what was once a sprawling sea of grasses stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River where flora and fauna thrived, ditch seed examines the prairie and processes of colonization that whittled it down to 1% of what it once was. The exhibition introduces a mysterious figure meandering the prairie, collecting seeds, and disseminating them with a customized shotgun. Invoking firearms’ brutal role in decimating the buffalo and Native peoples of the prairie, this character’s Sisyphean attempt to reseed a complex ecosystem reimagines a violent tool of colonization as a reparative force. Images of the prairie are fragmented, distorted, and reconfigured within an installation that references a shooting range, simultaneously staging an elegy for the prairies erased by violence and a call for restorative healing.
Curated by Jared Packard, ditch seed represents a truly collaborative endeavor by artists Annika Johnson, Jesse Meredith, and Sarah Rowe.
*Due to ongoing COVID-19 related public health concerns, viewings of ditch seed will be by appointment and limited to small groups of 10 people, or fewer, at a time. Please register through Eventbrite or email peter@amplifyarts.org to schedule a time to visit outside of regular gallery appointment hours. Face masks are requested.
About the Artists:
Annika Johnson is a musician and Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum where she is developing installations, programming, and research initiatives in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Her research and curatorial projects examine nineteenth-century Native American art and exchange with Euro-Americans, as well as contemporary artistic and activist engagements with the histories and ongoing processes of colonization. Annika received her PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 and grew up in Minnesota, Dakota homelands called Mni Sota Makoce.
Jesse Meredith is an artist, photographer and educator. His work incorporates lifestyle research with photography, sculpture, text, and public installation to trace relations between identity, power, and belief systems. His practice highlights and undermines white patriarchal structures that isolate and separate us, and empowers viewers to address their own biases and discomforts.
Jesse’s work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Limassol (Cyprus), and Buenos Aires (Argentina), among other virtual and physical spaces.
Sarah Rowe is a multimedia artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.
About the Curator:
Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE where he is the Exhibitions Manager at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; an urban curatorial experiment, Stumble Chicago; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.