Editor’s note: Epiphany Knedler appears in our June 2025 exhibition, Midwest Nice. Visit the exhibition here.
"You're not really from the Midwest,” Epiphany Knedler’s friend, a transplant from Indiana, once told her. “The Midwest includes Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio—you’re from the West.”
Born in Kansas, which she describes as “the epicenter of the Midwest,” and raised in a quiet corner of South Dakota, mixed-media artist Epiphany always considered herself a dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner—until she ventured outside the famously amorphous region for graduate school in North Carolina. During this time, she met her current partner and creative collaborator, sculptor Tim Rickett, a Nebraska native who bonded with Epiphany over a fiberglass bison in one of her pieces. “I walked up and just said, ‘Menards?’” recalls Tim. “She said, ‘Yup, Menards.’ We ended up talking about a number of weird Midwest things.”
Soon after their Midwestern meet-cute, the pair would begin work on Here in the Mysterious Elsewhere, an ongoing, expansive vision of the original “Middle West”—Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The titular phrase, borrowed from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, reflects his impression of the South Dakota Badlands, which stirred within him an indescribable feeling of “distant architecture, ethereal… an endless supernatural world that is more spiritual than earthly, yet created from it.”
Today, conventional maps place South Dakota—where Tim and Epiphany currently reside—squarely within the Great Plains, a flat, grassy subregion of the Midwest that stretches from Texas to Canada. The couple’s Prairie series, a smaller collection of works within Mysterious Elsewhere, explores the repercussions of westward expansion post-Civil War. In 1862, the Homestead Act encouraged settlers to claim and cultivate “undeveloped” public land west of the Mississippi River, displacing Indigenous populations, disrupting traditional agricultural practices, and ultimately wreaking ecological havoc on the region.
“The Mysterious Elsewhere stems from the concept of Manifest Destiny, which suggested that this land was available for settlement because we had pushed Indigenous people farther and farther West,” says Epiphany. “As a result, this land could be exploited to grow things for the rest of the country. Nowadays, people mostly visit this area only to see family. Many of the small family farms have disappeared, replaced by large corporate farms. Thinking about how the land has changed over the last 200 years or so is truly fascinating.”
In Today’s Q+Art Interview...
Epiphany Knedler and Tim Rickett discuss Dust Bowl-era cuisine, share their thoughts on the ups and downs of Midwest state mottos, and explain why there’s a lot to celebrate in America’s so-called “lost region.”
Can you tell us how geography affects South Dakota's culture?
Epiphany Knedler: South Dakota is also separated into two different regions; we're separated by the Missouri River. We have East River, which is more farmland, and most of the universities are located on that side. West River is more like the Badlands, the Black Hills, and more traditional things you think about when you think about the West and cowboys.
Tim Rickett: Any time anybody thinks about South Dakota, it's Mount Rushmore.
Based on your research, how else has the region changed over the decades and centuries?
TR: There's been a lot of rebranding, particularly in South Dakota and Nebraska. In Nebraska, they tried using the slogan, "Nebraska, honestly, it's not for everyone." When we first got to South Dakota, there was a big crackdown on meth. South Dakota and Nebraska where we’re both from, there’s tons of meth. But they had this slogan that was, "Meth, we're on it." Like we're trying to stop it, but... we're actually just on meth. And now it's, "Great faces, great places."
What led you to shift your focus from telling specific regional stories to celebrating a broader range of narratives?
TR: Initially, we wanted to talk about some of these stories within the region that are not super known, or more word-of-mouth stories in books and things that we were looking through, and talking to people, because we do like these stories. We enjoy hearing these weird tidbits of information about this place that has mixed reviews.
Then we realized that some of these stories weren't ours to tell. So, we just switched it to hearing the stories elsewhere, which was way broader of a topic. But what we were also doing was a celebration of what is here instead of the more traditionally known things.
The Dust Bowl was an ecological disaster that compounded the effects of the Great Depression on the Plains. What are your thoughts on the Dust Bowl and its significance in Midwestern mythology, especially in relation to your work?
EK: Most of my family is from Kansas and Iowa. My great-grandma just passed away in February at 102 years old. Her whole family was made up of farmers. She would tell us this story about how, during the Dust Bowl, where they lived in Diagonal, Iowa, a very small town, during the day, they would put their plates face down so the dust wouldn't get on top of them. When it was time for dinner, they would turn them over, turn the cups over. And then there'd be a ring of dust around where the plates were. Because they couldn't grow a lot, most of what they ate then was onion and mayo sandwiches. That is what she survived on, which sounds like the worst.
How do you think perceptions of South Dakota among people from other regions impact how its stories and narratives are told?
EK: In my first year of undergrad, I moved out to DC at George Washington University, and I would tell people I was from South Dakota, and they'd be like, "Why?" Like, What's there?" Or, "Oh, did you ride a horse to school?" Stuff like that.
We don't want to be as negative about everything here. We grew up here. We do have a love for it. So many people from the coasts or who have no relationship with South Dakota, besides knowing anything politically about it, just think, "Oh, I'm sorry you're from there." They think very negatively about it. And we want to have more of that celebration of the stories, and talk about more of these complicated relationships and narratives that we have to the region, but still talk about the more exciting things, and the things that people have been through, particularly, when it comes to that idea of the land, and the environment, and never knowing what's coming next, and being resilient.
What are three books you would recommend to our readers?
Both: The Gift by Lewis Hyde; Art in the After-Culture by Ben Davis; The Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis.
Epiphany Knedler: Website | Instagram
Tim Rickett: Website | Instagram
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All images published with permission of Epiphany Knedler and Tim Rickett.