Groundwork is a landscape drawing built around the places the artist and his partner, Sara Jasmine Moore, worked in Lincoln, Nebraska over the last 15 months. Comprised of three parts, “Bryan’s Town,” “Allo Vera” and “Tower of Power,” Groundwork maps a personal environment of 24-hour fast food restaurants, elementary school classrooms, grocery store meat counters, and artist studios onto a cityscape already teeming with the countless small labors of others. How does the work we do day-to-day fit into the larger geography of the city? The drawings in Groundwork suggest that it is in the miniature, the intimate, and the everyday that we will find richer representations of the cities we live in.

Owen Buffington is a mixed-media artist whose work explores the intersection of geography and the visual arts—in particular the role drawing plays in shaping how we describe, define and organize everyday spaces. Drawing from the visual language of maps, blueprints, plans and diagrams, he creates a personal geography of the places around him that privileges the messiness of lived experience over the tidiness of idealized space. Owen Buffington received an MFA, with an emphasis in drawing, from the University of Arkansas in 2017, and a BA in geography and urban studies from Macalester College in 2004.