Imagine Iowa Great Lakes and the Iowa Lakeside Lab are excited to announce the all-new Public Art & Ecology Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program which invites artists to apply for an eight-twelve week residency. Lakeside Lab is a biological field station and nature preserve located in the northwest region of Iowa. The residency program is offered with …
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For Immediate Release Wednesday, October 7, 2020 Iowa Lakeside Lab, Imagine Iowa Great Lakes Launch New Artist in Residence Program Milford, Iowa – Iowa Lakeside Laboratory and Imagine Iowa Great Lakes today launched a new Public Art & Ecology Artist in Residence (AIR) program. The program will result in the creation of interactive, artistic experiences …
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We’re very excited to announce the 2019 Iowa Lakeside Lab Artists-in-Residence! The application pool this year was very competitive so we are extremely excited to be welcoming these six artists working a broad range of media to the Iowa Lakeside Lab this summer. Stay tuned for open studio dates, artists’ lab reports, and more …
“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.” — Charles Darwin During my two-week residency at the Lakeside Lab AIR, I made a series of creative projects inspired by site-specific findings. Located alongside West Okoboji …
6/18 On Monday morning, with the animal behavior class, we released some sunfish, pike, bass and minnows that we had gathered for predator/prey experiments. It was a rainy morning, so we went to a coffee shop to talk about parenting behavior. During the discussion, Neil got a phone call from Dwight who restores natural prairies …
Read more “It is Important to be Fascinated by the Little Things”
Monday Hannah and Richelle and I go out with Neil’s class and collect samples of smaller organisms in the muck in one of the locations around the west side of the lake. I decided late last week that I wanted to make sure I saw as much as I could around the lake and soak …
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” ― Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder How often do you spend time in nature? Do you connect with nature daily? Do you listen for bird calls or get up close to a spider’s web …
Read more “Artist and scientists must inspire others to see like them.”
6/10 I began my drive to Iowa from Kalamazoo, Michigan on June 10th. It was my first trip into the state, and I really had no ideas of what Iowa or its landscape would be like. I was not altogether surprised that it was flat, but had not considered the vastness of the landscape before …
Read more “Mucky Areas, Animal Behavior, and the Value of Observation”
Day one I was anxious the two days before departing for the residency up at lakeside labs. I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t pack until Sunday afternoon when I drove up and kept forgetting things. The drive up was perfect, sunny, and clear. Driving past the etched checkerboard of lines the Jeffersonian Grid, those mile …
Read more “Visual Research and Spontaneous Studies from Life”
Week 2 – No comfort in a growth zone, no growth in a comfort zone The good news — no poison ivy yet! Sunday There was a lovely parents brunch today. Lisa Roti did a beautiful job decorating the room and Erika created a buffet that was really lovely. I’d like to add that the …
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For more than 5,000 years, tallgrass prairies occupied 240 million acres of North America’s landscape, about 85% of the Midwest. All of this changed in the 1800s with European settlement. Settlers arrived with the goal of “breaking the land,” to replace the rolling prairies with productive farmland. They succeeded, and today, from region to region, …
Week 1 – Becoming Intimate With fear Face toward your fear, leap into your fear, and . . . smile at fear. But the main teaching is that you actually can stay with it, you actually can turn towards it, you actually can leap into it rather than having it set off this chain reaction. …
To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. – John Dewey Our word radical …
Read more “The Prairie Flower and the radical nature of experimentation”
WEEK 2 Day 7 Saturday, May 19 Worked on journal most of the day. After dinner went to Loon Lake. Tried another time lapse and some recordings of the lake, spillway and drainpipe in the ditch. Started moving the microphone to hear how sound changes with direction and when it bounces off of walls like …
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How do you quantify the value of a place, and determine the amount of space it deserves to claim? How do you measure the worth of a life, and the home and wellbeing that this life is worthy of? These are questions that I have found myself regularly wrestling with in different contexts. …
Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart. – Robin Wall Kimmerer I had a chance to go on a canoe ride with Mindy Morales-Williams’ Aquatic Ecology class on Tuesday. It was their second day of class, and they were collecting samples from …
Day One, Sunday, May 13 I arrived around 2pm, got a brief tour and then moved into my room and studio. I had to look around so I took a walk down to the water and looped back to the studio. Saw an eagle! The landscape has some elevation here, so there are more interesting …
Brian Schorn’s exhibition titled “Practice, Rhythm and Ritual: Meditative Minimalism” at Crooked Tree Arts Center in Traverse City, MI featured 24 new works created by him, many of which were developed during his time as an Artist-in-Residence at Lakeside Lab. You can read more about the work Brian made at the Lab in his artist …
Being deeply immersed in the web of nature’s way over the last four weeks has been an enlightening experience. The opportunity to work with and learn from the scientists at Iowa Lakeside Lab has added another educational dimension to this experience for which I am grateful. Through self-reflection, contemplation, direct observation, identification guides, classroom participation, …
Read more “Indra’s Net: Interconnectedness and the Ecology of Okoboji”
Week 1 (June 9th-16th, 2017) My first week here at Lakeside Lab has been full of all types of exploring. From exploring the grounds where Lakeside Lab is located, the collections in the many labs, and the lands that surround West Lake Okoboji. I arrived during the evening of June 9th, where I briefly walked …
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For the last three weeks, daily, close observation and contact within the natural world has led to two experiential realizations: 1) everything is changing (impermanence) and 2) the seemingly perfect design of all things is refreshingly imperfect. These realizations have been helpful in both my personal and professional lives. In twenty-one days, I have seen …
Read more “Imperfectly Perfect: Toward a Middle Way of Nature’s Chaos & Order”
What a mess and a blessing, to be back on the lake, expected to present a studio full of made objects for the benefit of expanding the students’ horizons. I am examining my anxiety levels with interest and frantically pasting tissue paper to sticks. I’ve become known for being a person who carries sticks around …
Read more “A Mess, a Blessing, a Giant Screen, and a lot of Sticks”
WEEK 2 REPORT After an amazing first week, the second week started out with a bang as I became even more deeply embedded in the ecology of the Lake Okoboji region. The highlight was having an incredible opportunity to experience the multitude of micro/macro relationships that exist in the natural world. This included learning, through …
Read more “Exploring the Micro/Macro Relationship: Worlds within Worlds within Our World”
During my second week at Lakeside, I spent a lot of time exploring specimen collections here and made some drawings based on my findings. In King Lab I found drawers of taxidermy birds, a cabinet housing an entomology collection, and a variety of plant specimens dried and labeled in clear boxes. I’m curious about collection …
Week two… where has the time gone. The past few days have been full of exploration including a field study on soil, sound recording above and below the water line, creating sound maps, creating light maps, exploring data gathered both digitally and through scientific testing, and a mild first of the year sun burn. In …
WEEK 1 Report: Reigniting the Wonder Lamp of the Natural World Upon arrival, I explored all of the labs and hiked the trails on the property to get a sense of where I would be living and working for the next month. Immediately, I developed a sense of place that felt like home. Home, in …
I loved sharing the studio with other artists. I ran around this week scanning the environment and experimenting with sound visualization.
Do you like kayaking, microscopes, great conversation, science, and food? Well, you would fit in great at Lakeside Lab. Week one of the Lakeside Lab Artist in Residency has been full of discussion, inquiry, learning, and exploration of the environment and topics relevant not only to ecology and science but art and design as well. …
Read more “Scientific data, ethics, personal awareness, & environmental impacts”
As an artist whose work is primarily inspired by the natural world, but whose understanding of ecology is more experiential than academic or scientific, the opportunity to sit in on classes at Lakeside Laboratory has been an invaluable experience. I’ve lived in the Midwest for less than a year, so I came into this residency …
Read more “At Lakeside, everyday conversations are peppered with impromptu lessons”
I got to spend this week tagging along with the various classes around campus and learning about the geography and ecosystems around Okoboji. I’m finishing this week full of inspiration and a thirst to learn more from all the great professors on campus. On my mind: diatoms, maps, and genetic algorithms.