Matthew Dehaemers, BFA’96, stands in front of 3,300 illuminated bottles of colored water — arranged like pegs in a giant Lite Bright — forming the partial face of a woman drinking bottled water from a green straw.
“Those are my wife’s lips,” Dehaemers says. That would be Creighton graduate Shayla Sullivant Dehaemers, BA’97; Matthew used her picture to create the wall-length piece — part of his impressive Watered Down exhibit at Creighton’s Lied Art Gallery.
The exhibit — on display this fall as part of the 45th anniversary of Creighton’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts — marked a special homecoming for Dehaemers.
As a senior student, he was the first artist to be featured in the Lied Art Gallery when it opened in 1996. Then, his medium of choice was printmaking and oil painting. Today, he works on grand displays — often with a social justice twist.
His Watered Down exhibit is a good example.
The main piece in the display was a pool-shaped structure (roughly 15 feet wide by five feet tall) depicting Midwest farmland and the Ogallala Aquifer that lies beneath it. The aquifer was represented by hundreds of bags of water, connected by drinking straws to the farmland above — painted acoustic tiles made to look like crop circles. Each tile was topped with a little, moving clock-like hand. “Irrigation pivots,” he explains. Corn stalks and gas-pump handles, fashioned out of packaging tape and water bottles, rose from the middle of the piece. A water tower provided visitors a bird’s-eye view of the fields; a giant molecule of a crop pesticide hung on a nearby wall.
“Water is something you can’t go without,” Dehaemers says. “We just take it for granted that it’s there and will always be there.”
Another part of the display featured plastic piping winding from a water fountain outside the gallery to a video on the scarcity of water in Ethiopia inside the gallery.
“It just shows the extreme contrast,” Dehaemers explains. “We have to walk a few feet to get a drink of water, where, in some countries, they have to walk miles.”
Dehaemers spent nearly six weeks — three or four days a week — constructing the exhibit. He received help from Creighton students and encouragement from his mentor — Creighton art professor John Thein, whose own work has been exhibited and recognized internationally. “He’s amazing,” Dehaemers says of Thein. “He’s always willing to help. He calms me down when I’m freaking out about a project and helps me problem-solve.”
Dehaemers is a native of Kansas City, Kan., and has a studio there. He came to Creighton in the footsteps of his brother, David, BSBA’82, and sister, Renee, BSBA’89. After earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Matthew spent a year with the Mercy Volunteer Corps, teaching art to students on the Native American reservation in St. Michaels, Ariz. He then worked as a graphic designer in Kansas City, before earning his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002. There, he began working with different materials — at one point sharing art space with furniture designers.
His art has included an eclectic use of materials: 16-foot tall aluminum and steel sculptures with automated gate arms; a phone booth created entirely out of recycled phone books; the front end of a 1978 Cadillac; 1,110 feet of PVC tubing and 200 pounds of rope creating a ghost-like streetcar; and 1,100 foam pool noodles chopped into 80,000 disks for a floating mural. And his work has focused on a variety of social concerns, from race relations (he wrote in chalk along a half-mile of sidewalk outside the Douglas County Courthouse about the 1919 Omaha lynching of William Brown) to caring for those with Alzheimer’s. His work can be seen online at matthewdehaemers.com.
Along the way, he has collected numerous awards, including the State of Kansas Fellowship for Artistic Achievement, four Public Art Network recognitions and an NAACP Community Contribution Award. But his greatest reward, he says, is involving others in his work.
“I like to make work that people can relate to,” Dehaemers explains. “I like to engage people, including those who may have never had an experience with art, so that they can have their own epiphany.”
