A preview of Peerless’ wall installation titled This Strange Phase. Photo courtesy of Peerless.
One of my favorite parts of Big Omaha takes place not in the main speaking room at KANEKO but in rooms and hallways that lead up to it, which have played host to art installations and exhibits since our first conference in 2009. These artists, who have dedicated tens and hundreds of hours ahead of time, make the event a unique experience for attendees. Last year, for example, Scott Blake exhibited his Barcode Art of Gary Vaynerchuk that when you scanned a barcode a connected computer played an episode of Wine Library TV.
This year will be no different. On the eve of the first full day in KANEKO, I’m excited to announce the four artists that will be sharing their talents with attendees. A diverse group — they work with everything from cameras to power tools — they’ve constructed art that’s sure to make Big Omaha an unforgettable experience.
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Here are brief introductions to the artists that are now listed on bigomaha.com. (For those that won’t be at Big Omaha, stay tuned. In the coming week you’ll see coverage of each of the exhitbits or installations below.)
Peerless
Caleb Coppock, Daphne Eck and Bethany Kalk
In response to the moon’s constant presence and cyclical influence on our world, This Strange Phase is an installation of projected animations, sound and gridded paintings that host mournful vocals, poetic fragments and animated activities affected by lunar patterns.
Selective Perspective Detective Objective
John Henry Müller, Alex Gates and John Hobbs of What Cheer
Grab the smart phone, Watson! It’s time to earn prizes while you explore every nook and cranny at Big Omaha with Selective Perspective Detective Objective (SPDO). SPDO (pronounced: spee-doh) is an interactive seek and find game with a twist. All you need is a QR reader and Twitter account. Start sleuthing and race to the top of the leaderboard.
Dear World: Omaha
Robert X Fogarty with help from Andy Stoll and Daniel Müller
Over the past year, Omaha native and current New Orleans resident Robert X Fogarty, founder of Dear World, has photographed written messages on people’s bodies in his signature accessible portrait style. From a sixth grader who dreams of attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (I’m Going to College) to Super Bowl-winning quarterback Drew Brees (1…2, Win for You), Fogarty’s work is now seen over 2 million times per month online. Dear World began as Dear New Orleans, a collection of love letters to a city where people know what it’s like to lose something they love. It’s now grown into a rapidly expanding social good startup, adding Dear World photographers around the globe, tasked with capturing the messages that make us live and laugh, love and play. (Photo: Darrelle Scott, 12, participates in a past Dear World photo booth. Photo from facebook.com/writeourfuture.)
Jeffrey Koterba
Jeffrey Koterba is an award-winning cartoonist for the Omaha World-Herald. His work is distributed through King Features Syndicate to 400 newspapers nationwide and has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2010, two of Koterba’s cartoons flew aboard space shuttle Discovery.
