OMA ARTalks
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 S. 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
Explore Bemis's current exhibitions from the perspective of Omaha-based artists, creatives, and community leaders. Speakers will share how specific works of art in each exhibition have deeply resonated with them.
Speakers include:
Stacey Barelos, PhD, sound artist, composer, and director of Soundry
Gretchen Larsen, PhD, Instructor at The University of Nebraska Lincoln's Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media
Alex Myers, MFA, Program Director & Associate Professor of Graphic Design & Film at Creighton University's Department of Computer Science, Design & Journalism
Admission is free; ticket reservations are encouraged.
Dr. Stacey Barelos is a sound artist and composer whose work centers on listening, collaboration, and experimental sound practices. She is the director of Soundry, an Omaha-based program focused on collective listening, sound-making, and exploratory performance through participatory events and workshops.
Her practice spans performance, education, and community-based work, often incorporating improvisation, expanded instrumentation, and audience engagement. Recent international engagements include the 9º Encontro Internacional Piano de Contemporâneo in João Pessoa, Brazil, where she presented talks on Deep Listening and toy piano performance. In Athens, Greece, she performed with Ludus Duo and gave a university talk on toy piano, collaboration, and interdisciplinary performance at the Contemporary Music Research Center.
Through both her artistic work and her leadership of Soundry, Barelos is interested in how attentive listening can shape shared experience and creative exchange.
Gretchen Larsen is an artist who creates light-based sculptures and installations, blending traditional techniques like woodworking with electronics, digital fabrication, projection design, and creative coding. She has taught creative coding at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska (UNL) for the last five years, where she developed her doctoral research on teaching coding as an artistic medium. She holds a PhD in Innovative Learning Technologies and an MFA in sculpture, both from UNL. She currently teaches in the emerging media arts program and does lighting design work.
Alex Myers is Associate Professor of Interaction Design and Director of Graphic Design & Film in the Department of Computer Science, Design, and Journalism at Creighton University. Often interrogating issues of immersion, affect, violence, and interactivity, Myers's new media work has been widely exhibited in international venues across North America and Europe. His work has also received numerous grants and awards, including the Provincie Groningen Kunst en Cultuur Prijs in 2009 and 2014; the Electric Objects Artist Grant in 2016; and the “Best Interactive” Award from the Austin Music Video Festival in 2017. As a visual artist, he explores the use of video game technologies in media art. In his work, Myers interrogates the critical roles which technologies familiar from mainstream media contexts can play in experimental art practices.
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Contemporary Arts
724 S. 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
402.341.7130
info@bemiscenter.org