Surfaces. A&M Building, Big Springs, Nebraska. Exhibition. 2026.
In 2026, M12 STUDIO’s A&M Building hosted PROOFS in residence for the development of Surfaces, an exhibition that maps the layered grounds around Big Springs, Nebraska, selecting, scaling, and projecting them to be read and read again. Developed through fieldwork in and around Big Springs, the exhibition brings together site recordings of the Big Spring made through walking, scanning, and drone imaging, translating them into point clouds, orthomosaics, and collage-based images.
The works assemble a cartographic record that moves between body and sky, image and surface, model and map. Rather than attempting to produce a comprehensive portrait of the landscape, Surfaces considers how a place becomes legible through repeated acts of looking, measuring, recording, and moving through it. Changes in scale and perspective bring different features forward: water and vegetation, paths and property lines, buildings and infrastructure, and the marks left by human and nonhuman activity.
Presented alongside M12 STUDIO’s Traveler’s Guide to the Big Spring, the exhibition situates the spring, its waterways, and local ecology within a broader landscape of buildings, monuments, trails, agricultural lands, and historical sites. Together, the projects approach Big Springs not as a fixed or singular place, but as a landscape shaped by overlapping natural and constructed systems and by the histories and forms of use that continue to accumulate across its surface.
About PROOFS
PROOFS is a design-research practice founded in 2024 by Reese Greenlee and Nitzan Farfel. Working across architectural and structural design, the studio describes its approach as a form of “documentary architecture,” grounded in direct engagement with sites, materials, and communities. Their work spans cultural landscape surveys, civic infrastructure, speculative building systems, and field-based research, with projects including studies of Kansas county fairgrounds, mobile civic architecture, storm-shelter prototypes for manufactured-home communities, and research into extractive landscapes.
Surfaces grew out of PROOFS’s residency at M12 STUDIO’s A&M Building in Big Springs, extending this field-based approach to the landscapes and cultural geographies of the Ogallala region.
