Travel Distance curated by Amber Zora

Travel Distance curated by Amber Zora

Jun 3–Oct 9, 2022

Travel Distance curated by Amber Zora
June 3 – October 9, 2022
Main Gallery

featuring:
Miridith Campbell (Kiowa), Joe Devera, Claudia Hare, Jenn Hassin, Gina Herrera, Jessica Putnam–Phillips, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Renee Romero, and Sarah Sudhoff

Travel Distance explores the military experience of service members and their families. The artworks featured represent how veterans and their families have processed, moved through, purged, and reclaimed their experience around military service.

Deployment and relocations can be and often are confusing times. Individual military members grapple with their daily tasks at hand while processing their distance from home and the future. For families who have undergone multiple deployments, there is a constant reshuffling of the household order. On the other side, everyone mourns the lost time and attempts to put the pieces back together. But the pieces often do not fit like they did before.

The exhibition also explores the multitudes of the veteran-identity. Veterans are parents, siblings, immigrants, Indigenous peoples, environmentalists and more. Even though service members and their families are widely depicted in the media from insurance commercials to sniper movies, the common media portrayal does not represent the uniqueness and differences within the veteran population.

Curator biography
Amber Zora is an independent curator and interdisciplinary artist based in Rapid City, SD. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Alabama at Birmingham and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography + Integrated Media from Ohio University. From 2018-2019 Zora was the National Veteran Art Museum Curatorial Fellow, serving as one of the key organizers of the National Veterans Art Museum Triennial & Veteran Art Summit. Zora has also worked as an an arts administrator for Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA and First Peoples Fund Rapid City, South Dakota.

Zora has exhibited her work in local and national galleries including the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Las Vegas Contemporary Art Center and the National Veterans Art Museum, among other notable spaces. Zora was enlisted in the US Army for 8 years and deployed to Qayyarah West, Iraq  for one of those years as an ammunition specialist from 2006-2007 with the 592nd Ordnance Company.