Past Life Raft no. 1
Amanda Smith
2019
Springfield, Missouri
Acrylic, spray paint, canvas, wool, mixed cotton fabrics, digital prints on cotton, polyfill

Amanda Smith uses collage techniques to piece together representational images, patterns, and abstract color fields. This collage practice became the gateway for Smith’s exploration into quiltmaking, textile design, and soft sculpture.
 
The edges seen in collage-generated imagery are a natural complement to the seams that appear in patchwork and appliqué. The seams in Smith’s soft sculpture feel cohesive, complex, and purposeful, with hand painted marks applied across them to bridge seemingly disparate imagery and provide a cohesive visual result

(Inner) Power Suit
tūdūsō
2019
Cotton, hand-dyed and printed with natural dyestuffs

tūdūsō is an art collective of two: Demetria Geralds of Bellevue, Nebraska and Victoria Hoyt of Omaha, Nebraska. Geralds’s career as a fashion designer stems from childhood when she learned quilting from her grandmother, cutting and seaming squares by hand without the aid of a sewing machine. Hoyt, who trained as a painter, also grew up around sewing and has always been drawn strongly to pattern, layering, and textiles. 

With (Inner) Power Suit, tūdūsō takes back a symbol of structural power and disrupts notions of women’s dress. Suits are traditionally prim and proper—and male—but (Inner) Power Suit stands defiant against convention. tūdūsō’s shared fabrication process generates a sense of solidarity and pride, prioritizing the handmade, the natural, and the communal.

Brackish, 2019
Delta, 2019
Eddy, 2019
Camille Hawbaker Voorhees
Omaha, Nebraska 
Thread, marbled paper, ink, etching

In Brackish, Delta, and Eddy, Camille Hawbaker Voorhees reveals her interest in spirituality and universal patterns in nature. The swirling shapes of the marbled paper mirror the titular references to river terminology. In contrast to the aqueous forms, pages from the dictionary were woven into gridded structures implying knowledge but becoming illegible. With a similar transformation, Bible text was spun into thread, the religious teaching simultaneously retained and destroyed. The hand-dyed paper and thread compositions function both as individual works but also as quilt blocks hinting at a larger future composition.

Shard VII
Camille Hawbaker Voorhees
2017
Omaha, Nebraska 
Etching on silk, nylon thread, burnout on paper

Camille Hawbaker Voorhees is a printmaker and textile artist who draws upon themes of family, religion, storytelling, and decay to make delicate text/image hybrids evocative of historical documents, lost correspondence, and microbiological processes. She uses the rectangular format shared by printmaking, quiltmaking, and journaling to create a delicate web of biomorphic etchings informed structurally by each other in systematic but indecipherable ways. 
 
To incise the hand-written text into Shard VII, Hawbaker Voorhees uses a textile technique called devoré, or burnout, traditionally used to create patterns in textured fabrics like velvet. She loads the burnout chemical, sodium bisulphate, into a pen and journals onto her visual works in ways that help clear her mind and are uninhibited by the rules, history, and conversations of contemporary art.

Untitled (Macedonia)
Jen Bockelman
2019
Seward, Nebraska
Pre-printed scaffold debris netting, yarn, embroidery

Jennifer Bockelman is a sculptor with a background in socially engaged art. At home in Seward, Nebraska or traveling around the world, Bockelman seeks out the stories we as individuals or as collective societies tell ourselves about who we are. In particular, she examines the narratives formed through the objects we discard, and she responds to these stories by altering and repurposing found objects as sculpture. 
 
Untitled 2 is a multilayered hanging textile work fabricated from discarded scaffold netting Bockelman found while in the Republic of North Macedonia. Normally this material is draped over the outside of buildings to protect pedestrians and cars from falling debris during renovation and construction projects. Bockelman was drawn to the grid matrix of the found textile; through needlepoint, layering, veiling, and draping she creates a mini-environment that alters space, obscures meaning, and leads us to question the factuality of the messages that surround our everyday lives.

Champloo Boogaloo I
Colin C. Smith
2019
Omaha, Nebraska
Resin and pigment on aluminum 

Champloo Boogaloo II
2019
Resin and pigment on aluminum

Colin Smith is more interested in provoking questions with his art than providing answers. Playfully and sometimes mischievously, Smith walks the line between two and three dimensions, marrying his non-objective painting background with the material sensitivity, seaming techniques, and volumetric nature of quilts. His work also highlights the hard edge geometry, monumental scale, and spatial ambiguity inherent in both of these practices. 

In Champloo Boogaloo, Smith responds directly to the compositional structure found in Laddie John Dill’s Untitled #1, 1980 from Ludy Strauss’s seminal exhibition Artist’s Quilts. Where Dill used a muted and shaded color palette, Smith uses intensely pigmented, high key colors. Where Dill’s work used traditional quiltmaking materials as a vehicle to engage with non-objective painting, Smith’s mimics the softness of cotton with his own voluminous, brittle, and mysterious non-traditional painting medium