Lydia Diemer + Riley Hanick
Central Library Bubbler Room
May - June 2019
Joint residents Lydia Diemer and Riley Hanick worked on a project titled The Office of Oceanic Feeling, which sought different ways to ask and answer the question of how we locate and experience the ocean as both a place and a myth, a concept and a history, an origin and an affect. They worked across different media in an attempt to both outline and enact the reality that oceans function not only as barriers but as binding agents. Oceanic feeling may mean, among other things, a capacity to sense and create by attending to the entanglement of human and non-human beings, of a self with everything surrounding it. Through a combination of print, drawing, writing, photography, and installation, the artists wanted disparate but related histories to interpenetrate: fossil records and psychoanalytic disputes, artificial islands and shipping corridors, bathyspheres and cyanotypes.
Lydia Diemer works in print media and installation. In 2005, she received an MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa. She has received travel and research grants from several organizations, including the Iowa Arts Council, University of Iowa, and Arrowhead Regional Art Council. She was awarded residencies at Anchor Graphics (2007) and the Center for Book and Paper Arts (2014) at Columbia College in Chicago. She has exhibited at EFA Project Space (New York), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), Des Moines Art Center Downtown (Des Moines, IA), and the Bemis Underground, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE). She lives and works in Iowa City, IA.
Riley Hanick is a writer and was a graduate student in library science at the University of Iowa at the time of this residency. He is the author of a book-length essay, Three Kinds of Motion (Sarabande Books, 2015) and the lead author of a collaborative guide to creative writing programming in libraries, Mapping the Imaginary (ALA Editions, 2019). His essays, journalism, and translations have been published in Seneca Review, Sonora Review, eyeshot, Labor World, and No Depression. His work has been included among the notable essays for the Best American series and supported by grants from the Jentel and McKnight Foundations.
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