2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageWorkshare Cocktail Hour and MWSPE Member Book Signing
Saturday, October 14 - 5:30PM to 7:30PM
Embassy Suites, 1st Floor Lounge
Workshare Cocktail Hour
Grab a free drink during the Embassy Suites evening reception and spread your work out on a tables in the hotel lobby. Tables are available on a first-come, first-served basis, though don't let that stop you from sharing work and socializing elsewhere!
Midwest SPE Members Book Signing
Midwest SPE members Dana Fritz, Jason Reblando, Zora Murff, and Julie Weber will be signing their newly published books that are hot off the presses.
Dana Fritz - Terraria Gigantica
In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores the world's largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona's Biosphere 2, Cornwall's Eden Project, and Nebraska's Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid carefully constructed representations of the natural world to entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the environment.
Giant terraria require human control of temperature, humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors' prepared sight lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires contemplation of our ecological future.
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
http://unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000007036
Jason Reblando - New Deal Utopias
New Deal Utopias explores three planned communities built by the US government during the Great Depression, collectively known as "Greenbelt Towns." The photographs of the built environments and landscapes of Greenbelt, Maryland, Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wisconsin, evoke utopia both as an idea and place in the American mind. The towns were designed to be model cities to address the social and economic discrepancies brought on and accentuated by the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the program was critiqued as "socialistic" and "communistic" by conservative members of Congress, industrial and corporate leaders, and newspapers hostile to New Deal policies, yet they still managed to make an indelible impression on urbanist ideas in America. This book emphasizes that the Greenbelt towns are an overlooked, but crucial part of the American landscape, as we continue to grapple with the complex roles of housing, nature, and government in contemporary life.
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag
https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/jason-reblando-new-deal-utopias
Zora Murff - Corrections
From 2012 to 2015, I worked as a Tracker for Linn County Juvenile Detention and Diversion Services in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As a Tracker, I provided services to youths who were convicted of crimes, adjudicated, and subsequently ordered to complete probation. Juveniles in my charge were asked to comply with services which may include: electronic monitoring, therapies, drug screening, and community service; it was my responsibility to have continual contact with them to ensure these expectations are met.
By reconsidering the role that I played in the lives of the kids I worked with, I began to acknowledge the burden that comes with tasking young men and women with continued complicity. My stance as a consequence kept our relationships in a state of flux ranging from stable to tenuous – a constant motion mirroring the discord that develops between the system's intentions and outcomes. Through employing ideas of anonymity, voyeurism, and introspection, Corrections is an examination of youth experience in the system, the role images play in defining someone who is deemed a criminal, and how the concepts of privacy and control may affect their future.
Publisher: Aint Bad
https://www.aint-bad.com/books/2015/11/23/zora-j-murff-book/
Julie Weber - Remnants
In the early 2000s, Julie Weber was working as a photo technician for a popular retail chain when the first wave of digital printers was making its way to one-hour photo-counters across the country. REMNANTS examines the materiality of photographs at a moment when the medium transitioned from analog to digital. Weber created the imagery for REMNANTS by layering, folding, cutting and creasing material byproduct from the photo lab printer. The artist's book is a portfolio of 12 unbound sheets: on one side, twelve individual images are presented, and on the other side, the twelve pieces can be arranged to form a single, composite image.
Publisher: SKYLARK EDITIONS
http://www.skylarkeditions.org/julie-weber-remnants/
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