Join us at 229 N. Gilbert for the Downtown Iowa City Gallery Walk!

This will be the closing reception for Laura Napier’s exhibition Drivers, as well as an opportunity to see Cicelia Ross-Gotta’s installation Each Other’s Medicine.

You can also visit 19 other downtown locations to see work by local artists!
More information on Gallery Walk here.

DRIVERS
Laura Napier

How do infrastructure, culture, and climate change connect? 

Drivers maps systems of dirty power through installation, video, and a collaboratively created diagram of ethanol-related objects. 

While Drivers refers to the causes of climate change, a video captures portraits of drivers as they pass by the artist’s home.  A drawn web of harmful energy networks includes the natural gas heating the artist’s home in Iowa City from western Texas, the nitrates from Iowan agriculture running down the Mississippi to the Louisiana and Texas coasts, and proposed carbon capture pipeline routes. An updated map shows how climate change enables new pipelines in the unfrozen north, and where oil and gas infrastructure is sabotaged in Ukraine, a crossroad between east and west. A stocking cap bearing a trademark, a bumper sticker made by prisoners, football, and traditions of land inheritance all link through ethanol’s political, economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions in a diagram derived from the collaborative workshop “Writing the Ethanol Implosion”, held at PS1 in March 2022.

The artist’s intent is to trace networks that support her dirty power. The point is to reveal the things we don’t think about, that have been in front of us all along. 

EACH OTHER’S MEDICINE
Cicelia Ross-Gotta

“When she read my name Weeping Willow out loud, she said she felt sad, too.”  

-Each Other’s Medicine.

Each Other’s Medicine  is an interactive story-installation of a retelling of the Greek myth of Persephone. This story is hand embroidered across and told by Weeping Willow, White Poplar, and Pomegranate, three plants that grew in the garden of the ancient Greek Underworld. The rhizomatic and nonlinear nature of plants is reflected in their storytelling; direct routes are rare. They want you to know about their friend, Persephone, and what happened when they met her. 

presented with support from the Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs