DEAD OR AMAZING is an experimental, immersive, interactive video installation that responds to audience movement and sound to generate a visual and sonic environment unique to each viewer. Through Isadora software linked to a camera, a microphone, and multiple projectors, viewers activate a composite of hand-drawn elements, video effects, and sounds driven by their body’s motion. These elements are layered together and projected across a 180° field, immersing viewers in a wall of imagery. Each result is unique, asking viewers to engage physically to explore different outcomes.

DOA combines mixed-media drawings by Ethan Edvenson with sounds and video by Charles Borowicz. Edvenson’s style of layering and collage, composed in a web of relationships in which individual images are sourced from memories and his everyday life, serves as a visual launching point for Borowicz’s mixture of synthesized and real-world audio sampling and video imagery exploring the ordinary and the fantastic. 

DOA asks the viewer to investigate ideas of authenticity, replication, authorship, computers as tools, and the human element in art. What does creation require? How does intention inform the final product? Is randomness a valid method of expression? In this moment of AI becoming more and more accepted as a valid tool of production, what is the importance of the human element?

Financial support for this project has been provided through an Artist Career Accelerator Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Ethan Edvenson is a visual artist from Des Moines, Iowa, who creates multi-media drawings on paper and through video using India ink, chalk pastel, and photography. His work celebrates the immense value and purpose in each of us through themes of humor, transformation, and the pursuit of what’s eternal. By using gestural mark-making, surreal imagery, and narrative elements, Edvenson’s heavily layered pieces invite viewers into a complex visual wilderness.

Edvenson earned a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Northern Iowa. His work has been featured in multiple solo and group exhibitions across the Midwest. In addition to his visual art, he has also contributed to various book and film projects.

Charles Borowicz is primarily a photographer and video artist interested in rebalancing scales of attention, elevating the mundane, and questioning the fantastic through a practice of deliberate looking, collecting, culling, and finishing.    

He allows a strong relationship to chance within his highly crafted imagery, incorporating uniquely technical and creative methods to achieve ambitious work. 

Borowicz has shown work across the United States. His recent large-scale immersive video piece, “Semblant,” is on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Muddling Through brings together sculpture and mixed media to explore resilience, identity, and the quiet labor of endurance through both personal and collective experience. Mirzam Pérez’s practice is grounded in textile sculpture and layered materials, where fabric, found objects, and vivid color fields evoke landscapes of memory, movement, and belonging. Her work often navigates borderlands—geographical, cultural, and emotional—using symbolic references to land, water, and mapping as ways to reflect on displacement, adaptation, and lived history.

In this exhibition, sculptural forms enter into dialogue, embodying the act of “muddling through” as both strategy and state of being. The Icelandic phrase þetta reddast (Muddling through) functions as a guiding tension—offering comfort, irony, and perseverance in the face of uncertainty. Through tactile surfaces and shifting imagery, Perez invites viewers to slow down and inhabit spaces of ambiguity, where fragility and strength coexist. The exhibition unfolds as a poetic meditation on survival, care, and the creative possibilities that emerge when outcomes remain unresolved.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Mirzam Pérez is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, mixed media, and photography. Her practice centers on textile-based processes, layered materials, and symbolic forms to explore themes of resilience, migration, belonging, and the relationship between land and identity. Drawing from personal narratives and collective histories, Pérez creates tactile environments where fragility and strength coexist, often referencing mapping, water, and landscape as sites of memory and transformation. Her work embraces uncertainty as a generative space, reflecting an ongoing inquiry into survival, care, and adaptation. Through material experimentation and poetic visual language, Pérez invites viewers to linger within states of becoming rather than resolution.