Digital Prairie, installation view
Something seems unsettled here. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that something is unsettling me. I can’t yet decide if what seems unsettled about the latest exhibition at Charlotte Street — “Digital Prairie,” co-curated by artists Poppy DeltaDawn and Steve Gurysh and featuring work by seven artists — is a result of my own preconceived frustrations with art too heavily influenced by academia, the lack of wall text offering context for the work, or just the nature of the times in which, let’s be honest, who among us doesn’t feel unsettled?
Is this not where many of us find ourselves in this moment, feeling rattled by Artificial Intelligence as the latest technological innovation that is or is not or soon will be or already has disrupted everything we know, including our own ability to confidently know anything?
(I was tempted to insert a couple of em dashes in the previous sentence to help with the pacing and clarity of the syntax—“is—or is not—or soon will be”—but now that the use of the em dash is associated with AI, I chose not to, to ensure I give you, dear reader, the impression that I am a bona fide and trustworthy Writer. Anyway…)
Standing in the gallery with DeltaDawn, we talk about the connections she sees between the Kansas tallgrass prairie, which is the subject of much of her work, and artificial intelligence as the latest wave of technological advances reshaping our relationship to the natural world. Our conversation initially focuses on her own work in the exhibition: four baskets woven from the bark of invasive juniper and cedar trees that are changing the ecology of the prairie.The baskets stand on pedestals at eye level, where viewers can look closely at their irregularities and peer into their interiors.
In DeltaDawn’s exhibition in winter 2026 at the Beach Museum in Manhattan, Kansas, her baskets were displayed among found and collected baskets and suspended from the rafters of a fabricated barn frame. Gallery lights cast shadows through the weaving, and standing beneath the rafters, one could encounter the installation first as an experience and only later learn the histories and ideas behind it.
Here in “Digital Prairie,” the experience is different. Brought down to eye level, the baskets become intimate objects, their handmade idiosyncrasies made visible. Talking with DeltaDawn also opens up another layer: the juniper and cedar she uses are invasive species, and her weaving transforms material being removed from the prairie into something useful. Her technique, meanwhile, draws not from Indigenous weaving practices of the region but from settler traditions introduced to the land alongside many of the species that would eventually alter it. DeltaDawn describes herself as a modern-day settler to this place, and the complications contained in that phrase begin to suggest one of the exhibition’s larger concerns. Modern Americans are tasked with weaving together far too many strands, trying daily to reconcile disruptions in ecology and economy, technology and politics, identity and belonging. Perhaps we ask a great deal of artists because we’ve already asked so much of ourselves and found our capacities depleted, bearing the marks of gashes cut deep into our attention and collective resolve, like the plow blades that once severed the root systems holding the prairie together.
What is to be done?
(Again, it occurs to me to open ChatGPT and ask, “What is to be done?” But then I remember that Claude has a better reputation for philosophical questions. I resist again. I keep the web browser shut and my own two hands on the plow. But my writing practice — the attention required to keep a thought intact long enough to write a 1200-word review based on my own encounters with and conversations about an exhibition — has itself been disrupted. Is it clear yet that it is I who am unsettled? The arrival of AI in our daily lives is unavoidable; I remember decades spent with deeper roots in my own mind, and I can feel the ways those roots have been severed, my attention slipping, my memory not what it used to be.)
One of the pleasures of “Digital Prairie” is the way the work begins opening these connections once you know where to look.
Co-curator Steve Gurysh, for instance, has placed a collection of aluminum “rocks” inside the cockpit of a salvaged Cessna airplane positioned in the middle of the gallery. The objects are recreations of prehistoric tools — arrowheads, hammers and other implements found in Wabaunsee County — scanned into 3D software and cut by a state-of-the-art CNC machine from aluminum salvaged from airplanes built in Kansas. The technological lineage folds back upon itself: ancient tools become digital files and then machine-made objects fabricated from the remnants of another technological era.
The work becomes about noticing how one innovation contains the memory of another.
Elsewhere, Michael Jones McKean places familiar everyday objects against dark, brutal surfaces rooted in the grid patterns of commercial solar panels. Childhood snacks, necklaces and bandages rest upon those rigid backgrounds as though they were soft mattresses, their weight exaggerated. Even a thin Band-Aid presses into the surface like a rock on a pillow.
The questions suggest themselves. Aren’t grids of solar panels as much a part of human technological history as the axe, the Band-Aid, the animal cracker and the chain necklace? Does it matter that the grid can evoke both the division and monetization of land and the possibility of moving away from fossil fuels? Are animal crackers, in the grand scheme of things, a high mark of human innovation worthy of documentation and memorialization?
The exhibition’s curatorial statement describes an “ecosystem broken by innovation.” For millennia, the prairie’s ecosystem was sustained in part through Indigenous practices such as controlled burns, which echoed naturally occurring fires and helped maintain the landscape. With European settlement came technologies that profoundly altered that relationship.
The curators point to John Deere’s steel plow, introduced in 1837 and capable of slicing through millennia-old root systems to clear fields for crops. Barbed wire followed, steadily transforming open prairie into grids, enclosures, and private property. Technology did not merely change how people worked upon the landscape. It changed the ideas through which the landscape itself was understood: something that could be divided, controlled, and made profitable.
Seen through that history, the arrival of artificial intelligence begins to feel less unprecedented. The technologies change; the promises and anxieties surrounding them remain strangely familiar.
These days I spend an excessive amount of time thinking about John Henry defeating that steel-driving machine and then keeling over. He died defeating the machine.
There are many ways to consider this folk tale and its relevance to our current dilemma. One is that while it’s possible to defeat the machine, it might not be possible to defeat it and save ourselves at the same time. We might have to sacrifice more than we’d like. John Henry won the battle but lost his life What good is defeating the machine if you’re dead?
But at the end of the day, whenever I think about John Henry, I land on the idea that whatever it is that makes us human, whatever animates our spirits and activates our minds and drives our best actions, whatever gestures we make that machines can never match — those small gestures, felt and articulated, created and shared — those are the parts of ourselves worth conserving, protecting, planting and sharing.
The most important fight might not be defeating the machine, but in being so utterly human every single day that the machine is exposed as the thing no one actually wants, and rendered obsolete.
Perhaps that is what “Digital Prairie,” which also features works by Colette + Jeff Bangert, Raven Chacon and Jeanine Oleson, ultimately gives us: not an answer to technological disruption, but a place to think about what remains worth tending as disruption continues. Here, it’s the art that does the prompting, and it is us who must think and respond.
“Digital Prairie” continues through Sept. 26 at Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming St. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. For more information, charlottestreet.org or 816. 221.5115
