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*Due to ongoing COVID-19 related public health concerns, viewings of Ebb, Flow will be by appointment and limited to small groups of 5 people or fewer. Please email peter@amplifyarts.org, or register through Eventbrite. Face masks are required.
In 2016, chants of mni wičoni (mini we-cho-nee) echoed through the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Translated from the Lakota, “water is life” signaled Indigenous North American peoples’ ongoing resistance to Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline that threatened, and continues to threaten, the region’s watersheds. Standing Rock focused the nation’s attention on hydraulic fracturing practices that capriciously exploit massive amounts of water, draining aquifers faster than they can recharge, lowering water tables until wells go dry, drawing off rivers and streams, increasing levels of toxicity, and destabilizing soils.
Politically, Standing Rock exemplifies a familiar privileging of corporate agendas, abetted by the United States government across sovereign tribal lands, over the health and well being of people and ecosystems. Extractive industries’ keen fixation on deregulation and privatization that creates conditions of scarcity, eclipses socio ecological consequences, and exacerbates the potential for conflict was justly met with acts of resistance, intervention, ceremony, and song.
Ebb, Flow, Amplify’s 2020 Alternate Currents Working Group exhibition, examines similar modes of cultural production and self-determination that stand up for nature and more specifically, water. Corson Androski, Travis Apel, Erin Foley, Dawaune Lamont Hayes, Rynn Kerkhove, Alex O’Hanlon, Thalia Rodgers, Sarah Rowe, Angie Seykora, and Molly Toberer put forth propositions and extend invitations to understand water outside of capitalist frameworks as autonomous, intimate, and intrinsic. From homemade filtration systems, to collective actions, to relational exercises designed to reveal complex webs of human and other-than-human interdependencies, the project-specific works in Ebb, Flow move water politics beyond distribution and access to collaborative acts of reciprocity, healing, and care.
Free and open to all. Virtual programming is presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the Artists:
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states.
Travis Apel was selected as a Work In Progress Fellow through Amplify Arts. He is an Outstanding 3D Artist nominee in 2018 and 2019 through Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards. Apel has focused his work through artist residencies at BarkerArt Hot Shops Art Center in, Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center in, El Museo Latino, and Mary Our Queen Catholic School. He was selected for a Friends of UNO Artslam+ presentation in 2015, and was honored through partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance and formerly Omaha Creative Institute for a professional development fellowship in Artist INC Live Omaha in 2014. Apel is a 1994 Missouri Silver Scholarship recipient from Kansas City Art Institute. Apel has exhibited throughout the midwest and his work is represented in collections nationally.
Erin Foley earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and MFA from the University of Southern California in 2012. Foley taught art and design + build classes for Urban Gateways and Afterschool Matters in Chicago, adjunct instructed Critical Studies and Art History at USC and Iowa Western Community College, managed Michael Rakowitz’s studio (Chicago) and assisted Andrea Zittel (Joshua Tree). In 2019 Foley earned her BSBA with an emphasis in Accounting at the University of Nebraska Omaha where she currently adjuncts a Sculpture class. She guest lectures on tax and finances at Amplify Arts and is the Finance Manager at Film Streams in Omaha.
Dawaune Lamont Hayes is an inter-disciplinarian working at the intersections of performance, social design, sustainability, and journalism. Hayes is a trained dancer, working journalist, and visual artist focusing on long-term community impact. By challenging conventional spaces through nontraditional means, Hayes synthesizes supposed opposites into new forms and processes.
Rynn Kerkhove is an urban environmental planner with backgrounds in food systems, affordable housing, and community engagement. While getting her degrees in Global Resource Systems and Urban Planning at Iowa State, she was fortunate to have many opportunities to explore the complexities of urban environments. In 2016, she was the Gerhardt intern at 1000 Friends of Oregon, writing a report on Oregon’s food system. 2018 was a busy year: Rynn interned at Iowa State Extension’s Community Visioning Program to work with small Iowa communities to plan transportation improvements; spent time during the summer working in the Cuenca, Ecuador Planning Department to gain a different perspective on planning abroad; and cofounded the Ames Tenants Union to give renters and houseless people an organized voice in her college town. Rynn currently works in the City of Omaha Planning Department.
Alex O’Hanlon is a community leader who is committed to supporting resident-led projects that enhance their quality of life. She’s worked as a Garden Manager for City Sprouts South where she coordinated programs, workshops, and events. Currently she works as Engagement Coordinator at One Omaha. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy/History from UNO and travels to California every fall to harvest olives.
Thalia Rodgers is an artist based in Omaha, NE. She loves eating good food, making Trillers, and Tik Toks, tweeting, posting on her Instagram, browsing the web, crying, and laughing. She received her BFA from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has won the Dan and Barbara Howard Award for Creative Achievement 2 years in a row, and the Wendy Jane Bantam Outlook Award. She wants you all have a great day and to have lots of fun :)
Sarah Rowe is a visual and performance artist in Omaha, Nebraska. Her work addresses issues of self-identity and exploitation of natural resources. She re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of our modern cultural landscape. Her work opens meaningful cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, textiles, performance, and Native American rituals in unconventional ways. Rowe is of Lakota and Ponca descent. She cofounded Sweatshop Gallery and has exhibited her work nationally.
Angie Seykora creates installation, sculpture, drawing, and painting that repurpose industrial and found materials. Through process driven, almost mechanical methods of assembly, she emphasizes accumulation and tactile materiality to produce work that references the history of minimalism, bodily systems, and "thinking through making". She received an MFA in Sculpture from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. In 2018 Seykora was the recipient of an Unrestricted Artist Grant from Amplify Arts and in 2016, was recognized as a Distinguished Artist by the Nebraska Arts Council through the award of an Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2013, she was presented with the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award from the International Sculpture Center, where she was selected for the Art-St-Urban Sculpture Residency in St. Urban, Switzerland. Angie Seykora is an instructor of drawing and sculpture at Creighton University. Her work is exhibited and collected on a national and international level.
Molly Toberer earned her MFA from University of Minnesota, School of Art and Art History (2000) and her BFA with honors from University of Kansas College of Visual Art & Design (1994). Her professional visual art research includes advocating for visual artists in the international art fair market, conducting workshops as a visual artist-educator, garnering civic public-art projects, and acting in artist-curator roles for the Department of Cultural Affairs of Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports [LAWA]. Toberer currently lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska restarting her sculpture practice creating hand-made objects and mediating public spaces utilizing the metaphors of industrial and repurposed materials such as metal, plastic and light that speak to human empowerment and transformation against the forces of humanity’s accelerated impact on the earth.