Digital Prairie Opening Reception

Mission Statement:Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers— acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $1.85 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visitwww.charlottestreet.org.

Charlotte Street

Celebrate the opening of Digital Prairie in the Charlotte Street Gallery—exploring the Intersections of technology, craft, and ecology.

Charlotte Street Foundation

Curated and Organized bySteve Gurysh + Poppy DeltaDawn Contributing Artists<a href="https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=bac6a193a84b96b1&amp;rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1114US1114&amp;sxsrf=ANbL-n7FfE4gWt_zQYSwASPBLBnQ3m1ivQ:1777672838035&amp;udm=2&amp;fbs=ADc_l-aN0CWEZBOHjofHoaMMDiKpaEWjvZ2Py1XXV8d8KvlI3o6iwGk6Iv1tRbZIBNIVs-6UIUc6UR6SuJFZzmDZDaBC-m-l14a_FtSAzW6lSIO-VulTn0qiECr51J_sv1CBYe7Fi6zVc2QcCw7c4eHHNCFWLNo-GpiCfxwIcWXUUkffqCGohGXzSNBKGPI8uKJlc4BNkqoRE19tmNM3bNno36ZErI4XvQ&amp;q=colette+bangert&amp;sa=X&amp;sqi=2&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiSxaawi5mUAxWFNoYAHaWlHzEQtKgLegQIGhAB&amp;biw=1920&amp;bih=1031&amp;dpr=1" title="https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=bac6a193a84b96b1&amp;rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1114US1114&amp;sxsrf=ANbL-n7FfE4gWt_zQYSwASPBLBnQ3m1ivQ:1777672838035&amp;udm=2&amp;fbs=ADc_l-aN0CWEZBOHjofHoaMMDiKpaEWjvZ2Py1XXV8d8KvlI3o6iwGk6Iv1tRbZIBNIVs-6UIUc6UR6SuJFZzmDZDaBC-m-l14a_FtSAzW6lSIO-VulTn0qiECr51J_sv1CBYe7Fi6zVc2QcCw7c4eHHNCFWLNo-GpiCfxwIcWXUUkffqCGohGXzSNBKGPI8uKJlc4BNkqoRE19tmNM3bNno36ZErI4XvQ&amp;q=colette+bangert&amp;sa=X&amp;sqi=2&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiSxaawi5mUAxWFNoYAHaWlHzEQtKgLegQIGhAB&amp;biw=1920&amp;bih=1031&amp;dpr=1" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Colette + Jeff Bangert</a>, Raven Chacon, Poppy DeltaDawn, Steve Gurysh, Michael Jones McKean, Jeanine Oleson — “The subject of all my work has been landscape. The elements of the computer work and my hand work are often repetitive, like leaves, trees, grass and other natural landscape elements are… The form of grass as grass, leaves as leaves, is what I’m exploring… Grass as form. Grass is also random and random is a natural computer facility. Computer grass is natural grass.” — Colette Bangert (In: Leavitt, R, ed. Artist and computer, 1976) Digital Prairie is a technological choir reverberating the landscape. Through the vocabularies, gestures, and geometries of machine language, musical composition, basketry, weaving and threadwork, tree harvesting, mystic architecture, computer-aided imaging and expression; together, these artists present craft, technology, and environment as a holistic and monstrous hybrid, an intergenerational, cross-cultural survey of human-computer-prairie interaction. The prairie itself serves as subject and cautionary tale, as an ecosystem broken by innovation. John Deere’s steel prairie-breaking plow of 1837 could finally slice through millennia-old root systems that wooden plows could not penetrate. By 1874, Joseph F. Glidden’s patented machine was mass-producing barbed wire, a low-cost means of enclosing agricultural land across the largely treeless plains. Over four decades, these technologies accelerated Western expansion and enabled the systematic displacement of Native peoples from ancestral lands. The artists in Digital Prairie reconfigure traditional and speculative knowledge through the lens of computer-aided craft, material culture and practices in land stewardship and connection. Their works converge on a critical insight that computational abstraction leaves concrete ecological footprints—marks of human activity in the geological record through an irreversible meshing of environment and infrastructure. This exhibition asks whether technology might be reoriented from an extractive force toward a regenerative one. Can our digital tools learn to grow like grass—randomly, recursively?

Digital Prairie Opening Reception

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Digital Prairie Opening Reception

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