2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageGallery Night: The Graduate Student Image-Maker Exhibition
Zora Murff, Lindsay Godin, Melissa Kreider
Friday, October 13 - 7:30PM to 9:00PM
Prairie Center of the Arts
Work from Graduate Student Image-makers Zora Murff, Lindsay Godin, Melissa Kreider.
Lindsay Godin - History is Written by the Winner
This photographic series depicts the various ways in which school children are exposed to American patriotism. From the primary grades to the secondary schools, children are continuously messaged with nationalism, loyalty and Americanism. These messages can range from subtle to those that are ostentatious. Our next generation of citizens receives a plethora of propaganda illustrating the necessary beliefs and proper attitudes to be good citizens. Children are taught to blindly support America and renounce any criticism of the republic as being un-American. The repeated messages include the romanticism of historical events including the wars heroes have magnificently fought and the nations they have successfully conquered. This imagery tells children that history has declared a winner: America. Lacking in these images are the truth of historical events, the liberty of thought, and the promotion of speculation to determine what is.
Melissa Kreider - Remnants: an investigation of the realities of domestic and sexual assault
Remnants is an exploration of the successes or failures of the reactionary structures that are responsible for engaging victims of sexual and domestic abuse. The photographs I am creating range from sites of sexual and domestic assault, the sexual assault evidence collection kits survivors have to endure, to the backlog of rape kits in police evidence rooms, the crime labs in which this kits are tested, and finally the survivors themselves. All of these aspects create a complicated and intimidating maze of steps a survivor may maneuver if they choose to rely on the justice system for assistance. This work does not serve to trigger or create a negative response, but exists as photographic evidence of the reality many face when assaulted.
Zora Murff - Re-Making the Mark
The Great Migration from the Jim Crow South for many African-Americans was a search for hope: an escape from lynchings, segregation, and financial disenfranchisement. Instead, oppression followed them north and west in the forms of continued racially motivated violence and prejudicial housing politics enacted by the Federal Government. The Near Northside neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska experienced such a history including lynchings, police killings, and the economic stagnation of the neighborhood due to redlining - restrictive housing covenants designed to force minorities into concentrated areas.
As a graduate student, Zora J Murff has been researching how we use images to reinforce sociocultural constructs, how we perceive what it means to be at risk, and how culture is reflected in the landscape. Working in the historically African-American neighborhood of Near Northside, he uses photography to interpret and re-present complex narratives about history, race, and violence. Murff's work explores the ubiquity and persistence of these narratives across time as well as the image and the archive as "witness". Through his comparison of current injustices to our inescapable past, Murff visualizes the boundaries created in the name of racism in America.
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