Grounding

Organized by Lydia Cheshewalla and Sarah Rowe
July 8 - August 19, 2022

A photograph of a mound of soil resting on a piece of raw canvas laid on the floor of an exhibition space. The close-up detail shows the subtle variation in the soil particulates’ color and size.

“This is the place that holds me. This is the place that holds my ancestors. This is the place that will hold my children. This place is me. I am this place too.”

–Lydia Cheshewalla

GROUNDING, organized by Lydia Cheshewalla and Sarah Rowe, explores reciprocal human and more-than-human kinship systems through acts of somatic co-regulation with place, land, and earth. Introducing ethically sourced soil pigments into the gallery space as a medium to produce body-prints on site, these two artists make visible the often-invisible interdependencies of Indigenous bodies and complex ecosystems. By positing land as body and earth as archive, the exhibition considers soil’s capacity to record the body’s impressions as part of an ancestral lineage of understanding what it means to be in, of, or from a place.

Click here to learn more about the project on the Alternate Currents blog >

Sarah Rowe and Lydia Cheshewalla are from Plains Nations that overlap. They share a kinship through their respective Lakota and Dakota lineages and Ponca and Osage Nations. In GROUNDING, they speak to the shared experience of forced removal across distances that articulate the imposed binary of "urban" vs "rural" Indigeneity. 

Lydia Cheshewalla is a transdisciplinary artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the ecological landscape of the Great Plains. As an Osage woman, her work primarily focuses on community, emotional awareness, environmental justice, ephemerality, kinship, and art as healing action. She is currently working on becoming.

Sarah Rowe is an interdisciplinary 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.

Amplify’s programming is made possible with support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

 
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