Concept 2016

OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION PRESENTS

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OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION 730 W. Wilshire, Ste 104 // Oklahoma City, OK 73116 // ovac-ok.org // 405.879.2400 COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ISBN // 978-0-692-75064-3 DESIGN // Dylan Bradway PHOTO CREDITS // The Artists, Kelsey Karper

OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION PRESENTS

JUNE 3, 2016 – JULY 23, 2016 HARDESTY ARTS CENTER, TULSA, OK CURATED BY // ADAM WELCH SEPTEMBER 2 – 30, 2016 CONCEPT FOCUS EXCHANGE THE LUMINARY, ST. LOUIS, MO ESSAYS BY // ERIN DZIEDZIC, KIRSTEN OLDS, LAUREN SCARPELLO, & ADAM WELCH

MEREDITH FOSTER // Drift (MO/OK) (detail), 2016, sifted ash and charcoal (made from invasive woody plant material and the remains from prairie burns), flourÂ

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

6-7 // INTRODUCTION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Holly Moye, Executive Director, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition 8-15 // CURATOR ESSAY Adam Welch 16-49 // FOCUS ARTISTS & RESPONSE WRITINGS GLENN HERBERT DAVIS // response by Lauren Scarpello ADDOLEY DZEGEDE // response by Kirsten Olds MEREDITH FOSTER // response by Lauren Scarpello HEATHER CLARK HILLIARD // response by Lauren Scarpello COLE LU // response by Kirsten Olds ANDY MATTERN // response by Kirsten Olds ANH-THUY NGUYEN // response by Kirsten Olds CATALINA OUYANG // response by Lauren Scarpello 50-53 // ESSAY The Center Is a Moving Target by Erin Dziedzic 54-83 // SURVEY ARTISTS 84-87 // BIO INDEX 88 // CONCEPT PARTNER INFORMATION

INTRODUC T ION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

HOLLY MOYE // EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR // OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION The Concept exhibition is an exchange project exemplifying the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s (OVAC) commitment to supporting and advancing contemporary art in the region. This second installment of the exhibition specifically focuses on direct financial support, curatorial guidance, and critical dialogue as the tangible mechanisms by which to nurture experimentation and strengthen connections among local and regional artists. Through the two components of this exhibition, OVAC offered a relevant platform for different junctures of artists’ careers. Concept Survey is comprised of 27 artists from Oklahoma and encouraged a broad spectrum of styles. Concept Focus is a group exhibition featuring commissioned work by four artists from Oklahoma and four from St. Louis, our partner city in the region. Endeavoring to advance careers and form a network among peers for regional recognition, Concept proffers a place for contemporary art in Oklahoma.

This exhibition compounds upon foundations laid in OVAC’s everyday work with artists. For 28 years, OVAC has been providing support to Oklahoma artists through education, exposure, and funding. Programs are built to facilitate artists creating compelling work, connecting with a comprehensive network, and finding new audiences. OVAC offers a diverse group of artists, emerging and established, rural and urban, the chance to boost their careers through professional development workshops, project funding, information resources, and the largest awards in the state. Concept additionally includes regional interchange to strengthen opportunities for mutual exchange among artists, curators, and the public, employing contemporary artwork to connect our communities.

Integrating the multiple channels through which OVAC comprehensively supports the visual arts, Concept purposefully involves components and participants from previous programs. The triennial Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship program provides OVAC with a pool of informed local writers and access to regional arts writers who produce critical essays for the exhibition catalog. The commissions, incentivizing awards, and introduction to curatorial collaboration offered through OVAC’s Momentum exhibition have prepared many of Oklahoma’s emerging artists for the subsequent level of artistic achievement demonstrated in Concept.

Dedicated exhibition partners, the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa’s Hardesty Arts Center (Tulsa, OK) and The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), assisted in the production, planning, and promotion of Concept.

Many conversations throughout this project led to invaluable relationships built amongst regional arts professionals that will spur even more opportunities to work together in the future. Many thanks to Holly Becker, Executive Director of the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa’s Hardesty Arts Center, and James McAnally, Founder and Co-Director of The Luminary, for lending your time, resources, and professionalism for the success of the exhibition.

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Endless appreciation goes to the Concept curator Adam Welch. Your overwhelming knowledge of the arts and thoughtful approach to curating made for a wonderfully eye-opening and adventurous process. To be able to translate such a diverse group of artists and their visions into fully realized projects to take place in two spaces this year is nothing short of amazing.

We are incredibly grateful to OVAC’s Board of Trustees and committee members, who volunteer their time and energy to ensure quality programming for Oklahoma artists. OVAC staff who work daily to support our mission include Lauren Scarpello, Associate Director; Joshua Cassella, Outreach Coordinator; and Jarica Walsh, Accounts Supervisor. Thank you for all your tireless work in bringing programs of excellence to our audiences.

Significant support by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, George Kaiser Family Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Oklahoma Arts Council, as well as organizational support from Allied Arts and Kirkpatrick Family Fund, made this exhibition and catalog possible. We are humbled by your investment in our organization’s vision.

And to the Concept artists, thank you for your ability to engage in thought-provoking work and your willingness to share those talents with us.

GLENN HERBERT DAVIS // broods (detail), 2016, mixed media

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C O N C E P T F O C U S // C U R AT O R E S S AY

ADAM WELCH // CONCEPT CURATOR ARTISTS Glenn Herbert Davis, Addoley Dzegede, Meredith Foster, Heather Clark Hilliard, Cole Lu, Andy Mattern, Anh-Thuy Nguyen, Catalina Ouyang

To know—Focus and to not know—Concept, and so on to trade and combine we get, Concept Focus.

Isolating the ‘now’ is no easy task. Time and place allot no direct ingress to understanding. Thus we seek foreign perspectives through expression to help foster new directions and challenges to our own preconditioned or preconceived notions of our environment. In this age that we live, with its cacophony of near continuous distribution of personalized information, global crosspollinations of cultural/familial histories, myriad of networks keeping track of the present and its cataloguing of the past, along with the ever persistent reliance on our technologies—we still seem to long for the experiences of others, in some cases even escaping our own intuition for an outsider’s voice. Is this perhaps just a part of the human imperative? I am not exactly sure. It also may be that throughout every epoch, the drive to gain a sense or ‘feel’ of the time has had similarities to what our present offers us. So it is my belief, that art throughout these ages, and especially art being created contemporarily (I’m a bit biased because I do live now), brings forth the ineffable paradigms of our present while holding attributes of what was established in the past.

Art is a contradictory model and systemic response to what exists in a middle ground—a communication device imbued with all the shortcomings and histories of the individual maker, as well as the world culture in which it was made. The manifestations of the agents who strive to break from dictum, present to us an awareness (even if contradictory or in the form of a question) that reflects back the underlying architecture composing the currentness of being. It is here, when we see a grouping of individuals working with and through this task at hand—a task that embodies the thoughts, feelings, actions and politics of today through new forms of artistic languages—that we compose a meditative and exploratory manifest with which to engage.

The artists and this exhibition of their recent works embody the motives from the sketch above.

The evolution of this exhibition in not so easy to articulate, in some ways it has been rooted in a sort of fixed criteria seeded with copious amounts of indeterminacy. Ultimately, culminating in a state of flux, open at any time to variable changes of course, the selection of artists and presented works came about with both organic and decisive moments of preparation. Being that the exhibition’s institutional structure implicitly guides how it has taken form (a regionally restricted pool of artists submitting, for example) there is no thematic directly tying each artist together. Although overarching correlations can be easily derived and advocated—one that pins out for me is how this group of works characterizes the expansive but ultimately personal impactful structures in our geo-political world—each artist and their work are arranged with a looseness of connectivity or dependence to one another.

ADDOLEY DZEGEDE // Everybody You Know is Here, 2016, mixed media (top left) GLENN HERBERT DAVIS // broods (detail), 2016, mixed media (top right) COLE LU // Odds and Ends, 2016, three pieces of neon tubing with metal suspension frame (bottom)

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C O N C E P T F O C U S // C U R AT O R E S S AY // C O N T I N U E D

I find that the eight focus artists all, in one way or another, engage in a current discourse echoing globally: where respective information sources blur into forms distressed from universal histories. These artists are articulating through forms and techniques that best appropriate their ideas and experiences without seeking any one movement or stylization as a foundational crutch. The progressions that we had once known in the art world, where artistic breakthroughs and direct art-to-art response-based work prevailed, are now basically moot. The linier chains of connections in some respect incurred the canon of art history that is taught in American schools and are probably missed by many, albeit are no longer relevant as a foundation upon which to directly build.

So the forms of art we are now seeing, whereas the idea might not necessitate a material or technical superiority, or even personal hand within a work, is natural and corresponsive to the dialogue. In a way, we have already crossed a threshold of a new epoch and it is revealing in its composition that the once helpful means of navigation (one history, overt logics, binary applications of facts, etc.) have become devices of limitation. This is not to say that the groundwork of forms, material knowledge, craftsmanship, and conceptual approaches forged throughout the past are being dismissed by these artists; they are informed individuals and are incorporating the past rather than being subject to it. Maybe it can be said that it is more of a positioning of the past as material to be used for the present—material that reflects and uses history as multiplicitous amalgam to be collaged as sets of information, divorced from an authoritarian promise of historical imperatives and absolute readings.

As an exhibition of works executed in the past year, I think about how these eight artists are working out pieces that are overtly connected to not only their individuality but also are incantations of the complicity one wrestles with as a part of the current, larger world structure. Transcending through material and the artistic hand, their works posit to the viewer alternate philosophic positions, exposing what we all have felt and/or are so distant from in our day-to-day experience.

As with the schemas we develop and chose to help persevere in such a cacophonous ripe arena that is our societal/ physical landscape, we tend to ignore or avoid many underlying attributes, which promote, regulate, or sustain our lives.

This is status quo. We are however sometimes topographically, bluntly—or if even on a subconscious level, confronted with these underlying truths and undercurrents that form our landscape. It is at these junctions where knowledge and what is overlooked or suppressed cleave. As we watch the confluence of rhetoric, science, religion, values, ethics, race, and economics stew in a caldron of media, conversations across the dinner table, multiple forms of imagery and so on, each effort to convey/distort/appreciate/understand holds implicit connection to the paradoxical formation of said confluence.

Maybe there is no one mode of communication that can encompass or convey this? Nevertheless, it by no means undercuts the human imperative to do so, especially if the thrust of the created landscape is so at odds with what it attempts to support—us as a people, culture or individual. I find that the artworks presented here—contemporary pieces of thought, expression and feeling—along with the far flung neighboring pieces strewn throughout the world at least present some focal point to enter the reflecting pool without diving in and shattering its mirrored surface. The art of our time and the work of these artists are positions looking at you as much as you are looking at them.

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While it may be a given, I should also mention that my roll in this exhibition is just one position in a larger framework of individuals. As such, what has influenced me in this process has been the ideas and conversations of the artists involved, the artists whom I had met during studio visits (Brett Williams, Liz Roth, and Kim Rice, just to mention a few, that I think of very often for the strength of their work and what it posits), and the many institutional leaders and co-workers (Holly Moye and James McAnally specifically) who have contributed countless energy into making this exhibition come to be.

I also would like to give a sense of the artists and their works in this show hopefully avoiding the heavy hand of text-based summary, declaration of what the works “are” and/or a format that serves as a defense. The following text is my opinion and observation. These artists are exposing the guts of our present and may be contradictory, paradoxical, off-putting, humorous, technical, empirical, allusive, coded, confrontational, subtle, but are all reflective and intrinsic of both the individual and the mass. It is with a dynamic set of variables such as this, combinatorial and often problematizing, that I become prompted to look both backward and forward, within my assumed present, to these inspired works.

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The commons and contradictions: The works of Glenn Herbert Davis fall outside of easy characterization. Connected conceptually to the relationships between body and the systems-among-systems-among-systems and so on, that we created and are subjected to, Davis’ pieces align with our paradoxical capacity as being both destructive and constructive forces within our environment— pointing at times to the fact that we don’t seem to fully understand the difference.

Taking form in aspects as an appendage of an ecosystem that might develop in the animal world, the works cull from our debris and “building” materials to involve an engineered structure composed for thought as much as place for actual habitation. Addressing his art production as a means of engagement—one for viewership as much as for practicality and experiment—he is generating forms that circumvent the norms of venue and value. The bee or bat does not need our conversations of aesthetics or a new wing of the museum for its promotion; it might however be subject to the shortcomings and effects of how these things have come to be. And as much as we ponder or pass judgment on form, color, and technique of the man-made endeavor, the principles that we find ourselves compartmentalizing and categorizing, at this point (with the broods piece) may be a work, which helps re-balance a system for all parties involved. Not too sure—but it is fair to say that without the bats and bees and so on… making it to the next art show will be a lot more difficult.

------------Connections—as loose as I can say it—bring us many things, and one so paramount and elementary is the connection upon connection that brought us to be here—family. Our existence in the present is one predicated by our inheritance and what they have gone through to precipitate our existence. Addoley Dzegede’s piece depicts one sliver of this endured past as an archetypal house imbued with distinguished and coded elements of her familial transitory circumstance.

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C O N C E P T F O C U S // C U R AT O R E S S AY // C O N T I N U E D

Unpolished, and in some respects raw, the materials and actualization of her piece graces its underpinnings with concerted respect and thoughtfulness. The particulars of one’s family experience, much as one’s own, are not quantifiably clean and clear of mishap and of splintered hopes. This piece finds some common language to promote such things but also finds a context to interweave the tenderness, kindness, and strengths present within a familial structure. The iconic shape of the piece represents not only a semblance of home but serves as a housing of energies transferred socially and hereditarily between the ones who have brought us to be here.

------------Meredeth Foster’s landscapes inhabit the floor plan of the gallery space with alchemic precision. Composed of plant materials—both indigenous and invasive to the area in which they were collected—burnt and sifted to become ash and charcoal, Foster lays out a landscape that straddles a divide between the baron and fruitful. The work assumes a foreign land’s topography, compositionally laid out solely of the artist’s creation but is painstakingly accurate as a mapping. It is here, an overview to location that gives no specificity, that proximity to the alterations of our physical landscape get to be considered. Referencing the transformative process that the railroad system has had on the world we inhabit, she distills, through the subtle gesture of ephemera, how human intervention—one so systematically enacted—has shaped the environments which we inhabit.

------------The work of Heather Clark Hilliard is one of research and experimentation. The pieces in this exhibition stray from a comfortable construction for the artist and host the unknown, missed conclusions and dynamics of struggle. These are implicit in most artistic processes but are often what artists run from when given a chance to show. Integrating in harmonic composition and dissonant strategies of approach to sound and visual presentations, Hilliard’s pieces are investigations into composition and dictation. Of the many pieces she has made, this set of works stray from the prominent retinal “reading” of her art allotting for a more synesthetic one. The works are then a processional confluence where the scripted, interpreted, performed, and judged all combine as movements to a larger body. The work counters harmony, almost argumentatively, exploiting what we may want to enjoy passively—subtle abstract paintings akin to what is common in settings like hotels, malls, or our Aunt’s condo and so on, abutting depth and dichotomy within the relationship of interpretation. These pieces are process-based in a different and attentive way. They are both product and descriptors that hold multiple streams of information within a façade—structures that transfer cumulative histories between collaborators positing a reality scarily closer to what the visual is trying to leave concealed.

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CATALINA OUYANG // kittytuna (Ophelia) (detail), 2016, extruded polystyrene, fiberglass, aqua resin, gypsum, resin, MDF, spray paint, acrylic paint (top left) ANDY MATTERN // Waiting, 2016, pigment ink prints, aluminum, motor (top right) ANH-THUY NGUYEN // Citizenship (detail), 2016, installation and performance (bottom left) MEREDITH FOSTER // Drift (MO/OK) (detail), 2016, sifted ash and charcoal (made from invasive woody plant material and the remains from prairie burns), flour (bottom right)

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We look to instructions and so we compromise our spirit of discovery. Cole Lu’s neon pieces embody this sentiment and tear open the fault in abiding by unthreatening or even helpful advertisements/promotional information. Her works frame the staple norms, commonplace and placid advertisements meant as helpful directions to foreign tools as ironic and self-enforcing stereotypical devices. To the statistical average of the Midwest, Lu is outside the norm. Her origins set into motion a dynamic framework where pieces that show us how and instruct, present a deeper penetrating set of meanings.

The set of pieces project some closeness to “Home” coinciding with tools from Lu’s personal history, but affiliation, as it is comforting, also acts as a catalyst.

Displacement is a term, which holds a superficial connection to the actual experience of the one using it. The blazon signage she has made serves then as a personalized advertisement, signaling that there is comfort in the defiance of a prescript singularity and beckoning to the passerby that the tools that they know are screaming back, informing us that our histories are most undoubtedly trying to omit/reshape.

------------Andy Mattern’s work strikes a particular chord with me. I find myself torn by the sleekness and its subsequent efforts to be so, while I also find such joy in that I am not distracted by any superfluous information. His Waiting piece is concisely minimized in appearance, quietly dissuading a read on the laborious production and research involved in its making.

What I find interesting is that in the form itself—an icon developed to convey a malfunctioning process in the Apple OS X software—Mattern folds the conceptual underpinnings which prompted the work’s inception into the experience of being a viewer to the piece. It is fun, scaled up to a comical and near intimidating size of a rotating piece of material and even brings to mind the large saw blades used in milling and stone factories—but all the while holds a sinister, frustrating, entwinement where you as the viewer have been pulled into a perpetual cycle devoid of any clear outcome.

With a piece that is converting one of the virtual symbols to which we have become accustomed in our digital involvements into a physical experience, Mattern is shifting reciprocity to responsive calculation. The “spinning ball of death” or “beach ball” (as it is often called) is outside of the digital world where a set of interactions caused the computer to slow, and becomes a symbol, popped up in my analog “reality”—on a wall, in a gallery, in a building, in a city, in a country and so on… inciting the helplessness of not knowing what to fix or when life’s program will resume correctly. This precipitates the crux. Deciding to either shut it all down and start again or pray that some of it ‘saves’ and continue on while I sit here and stare.

------------As with many artists in this exhibition, the multi-disciplined approach to making by Anh-Thuy Nguyen points to a necessity to work out expressions and ideas in modes avoiding stylization, continuity of oeuvre, and prescript or formulaic tropes.

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C O N C E P T F O C U S // C U R AT O R E S S AY // C O N T I N U E D

Here, using the gallery as a forum for presentation and performative engagement, her piece isolates an experience around ‘naturalization.’ Most prominently associated with the instituted process of attaining citizenship, ‘naturalization’ harbors racism, classism, and societal paranoia.

Through an installed collection of works addressing the inconsistencies and flaws of parts of the structure in which one may gain citizenship to the county, Nguyen situates herself as a fabricator and facilitator of a mechanism that tests some fundamental hypocrisy in our accepted system. In some regards the work brings humor to how there is no absolute solution to addressing the divisions created between the inhabitants of the world, while also underscoring the bizarre processes that we have established and abide by that determine who gains access or retains establishment.

------------Cultures continually apply their force, pressing toward homogenization. Being that we, a republic composed of individuals from every part of the world, take to this predominant motion poorly. In some great way, we as an accrued culture, are out of sync with the drive to become one. In most instances a confrontational exercise of fear and ignorance tries to corral others into this fallacy. Catalina Ouyang’s artwork finds a means to undermine the unscrupulous efforts toward commonality from a stance of biography and outside assessment.

Her magical-realism works are playful, highly sexualized, and almost cartoon-like, as if dropped out of some twisted Disney movie. And as such (with all the sub-plots and subliminal connotations in a Disney production) the work draws the viewer in and then twists their preconditioned entertainment into a conflicted knot—even if on the surface you believe you are just seeing something maybe cute or innocent. There is a dark, almost tragic underlying thread in the work. Innocence and play give way to the nefarious actions that others have and will execute on another to ensure dominance and power. In this world, fairytale endings are undermined for good purpose.

------------It has been a great pleasure to be a component to this exhibition. Between reading through hundreds of applications, viewing the large quantity of diverse and interesting works submitted, studio visits, and the continuing conversations that this process has fostered, I find that the artists here encapsulate as well as defy any ordering or contextual continuity, while strongly upholding the art and thinking that is defining our present. A showing of this nature should best be looked at as a survey—an attempt to bring forth some of the complex and divergent approaches, solutions, and angles that artists are employing in their practice—instead of a competition formed around a concept of winning. These artists are presenting contemporary strategies of viewing in touch and informed of the complex world around us. And as with most groupings of people and their machinations and creations generated in proximity to the present, we get to indulge as viewers, engaged or complacent, to be a part of aspects of humanity present within ourselves.

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Concept Exhibition Main Gallery at Hardesty Arts Center with: MEREDITH FOSTER // Drift (MO/OK) (front) MICHELLE HIMES MCCRORY // Twisted Branch with Living Shadow (left) GEOFFREY HICKS // Varigraph 9-27 (center) COLE LU // Rub; Thinking the word “somewhere” meditatively as both placeholder and ends (self-portrait) (right)

GLENN HERBERT DAVIS

My work is a continuing study of the theoretical and practical relationships between the individual human body and (contrived) systems—as incorporated in regiments of physical labor, vernacular furniture, utility architecture, and the photographic act—engaged primarily through the design, construction, and performance of furnished buildings, large-scale installations, photographic series, and live actions, using criteria based on physical limitations.

Limitations are set through multiple schemes—each including an effort to negate the assumptions of non-touch, non-entry and/or aesthetic purpose so routinely assigned. In this respect, function, fetish, and site-specificity are utilized aggressively to draw the question— perhaps to answer—that this entity “is for” something else.

My most current work also engages the contingent but non-contrived ecosystem, forming a study of relationships between the human and non-human animal. Of particular import in the making is agency; producing works that do, actually work.

I am aghast at the state of the birds and the bees of this world, and mortified at the toll art-making takes on the life of animals—is this a viable exchange, a relevant effort, making things simply to be seen, and in such a tiny scene? I do not directly seek a dialogue on this question, but for me its address has become central—to create entities that are most definitely for something else.

GLENN HERBERT DAVIS // broods (detail), 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable (all images)

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GLENN HERBERT DAVIS // broods (detail), 2016, mixed media

GLENN HERBERT DAVIS // response by Lauren Scarpello

Tucked away under the gallery stairs, or suspended high above aloft in the corner, spying one of Davis’ broods is akin to the experience of discovering a bees’ nest in the eaves of your house. At once you feel both awe in the craftsmanship, and dread at what lurks beneath—except the creeping sense of foreboding one may feel with broods is that of the self and the role we play in shaping the natural world.

These structures, built as dwellings for bees and bats, comprised of man-made materials, reveal that sometimes we forget humans are not the only builders in this world, nor were we the first, but we may very well be the last.

These self-contained systems will retire from the realm of art objects and become functioning refuges on the artists’ property at the conclusion of the exhibition. This trajectory both calls attention to and yet turns the tables on the ephemeral nature of art. For every action there is a reaction, and artmaking is certainly not without its own culpability. Is it possible to achieve artistic excellence in formal construction and execute perfectly detailed creations that are meant for something other than human consumption? If there is, Davis has found the honey pot.

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ADDOLEY DZEGEDE // Everybody You Know is Here, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable (top) Audience interacting with Everybody You Know is Here (bottom)

ADDOLEY DZEGEDE Addoley Dzegede’s work is project-based and ideadriven, investigating notions of home, belonging, hybrid identity, and existential migration, which she expresses through a multitude of forms—ranging from interactive projects and videos to artist books and textiles. She creates works that are meant to entice viewers to pause, and through interactive engagement, to question commonly held ideas about what it means to belong. Using both personal and public archives, she contemplates the forces of history, experience, and location, and how they work together to tell a story, essentially, of longing as a state of being. Projects are often based on and mark the specific, formative experiences of the artist—the congenital aspects of identity as well as those that are location-specific or chosen. This has manifested in re-occurring dualities: two shores, two sides of a game, two meanings, two rooms in a house, two ways of seeing, two sides of a dividing line. Dzegede asks you to see through the eyes of the other, while raising questions about bias and perception.

ADDOLEY DZEGEDE // Everybody You Know is Here, 2016, mixed media

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ADDOLEY DZEGEDE // response by Kirsten Olds

On its face, Addoley Dzegede’s Everyone You Know is Here explores the artist’s mother’s story, filtered through Addoley’s wide eyes and appreciation for objects as agents of history: we hear Sylvi recounting her college years, her own search for a meaningful place, from Ohio to Connecticut to Ghana, and from biology to anthropology. We watch as trapped insects convey isolation and depression, while scenes of sludging snails form an apt, if obvious, metaphor of home as integral to one’s identity. We see old photos of Sylvi, her own statements printed on their versos like captions for archival documents. There are books— on the Peace Corps, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a travel atlas—that act as agents of the real, corroborating Sylvi’s accounts, making tangible this tale told second-hand.

Yet Dzegede’s original fabric designs undercut this surety in the stories objects tell, as they recall the complex colonial networks of exchange that produced Dutch wax prints, as well as the often-hidden people and their laborious processes of hand-dying that made those networks possible. They remind us how selective memory is—it traffics in selected details and narrowing frames. Likewise, the idea of “home” itself is always an act of translation, a game of telephone from the mind of the past to the longing of the present.

Everyone You Know is Here wails a siren song, transporting us less to Odyssean locales sending us, alongside Dzegede, to probe our own origin tales.

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MEREDITH FOSTER

Our relationship to the rest of nature and the resulting transformations that occur from such inform my practice. I’m interested in re-interpreting the complex intersections between humans and the outdoors by exploring the transformative otherness of the natural world. Through the cultural lens of human landscapes, I use installation, drawing, and photography to facilitate the viewer’s re-enchantment with the natural world.

processing of non-native woody plant material, the sooty remains of seasonal prairie burns, and flour. The sifted material is configured into topographic maps through a combination of layers and stenciled imagery. This is followed by imposing an approximation of elemental forces on the sifted material, resulting in a simulacrum of the subtle and mysterious patterns of the natural world. Each iteration is manifested differently, but the juxtaposition of control and chance employed during

Drift, is a topographical installation consisting of an amalgam of sifted ash and charcoal made from both the collection and

their assembly underscores that landscape is a cumulation of congruent forces of human desire and natural phenomena.

MEREDITH FOSTER // Drift (MO/OK), 2016, sifted ash and charcoal (made from invasive woody plant material and the remains from prairie burns), flour, “144” x 144” x 8”

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MEREDITH FOSTER // response by Lauren Scarpello

Much like the materials of which it is comprised—sifted ash of both native and invasive plant species— Foster’s landscape offers a perceptual balance of topographical familiarity with the foreboding casualty of human intervention. Despite the sense that we have seen it before, it begs for further inquiry. Is this the Earth we are witnessing—perhaps the furthest reaches we have only seen in pictures? Is it a volcanic beach on the boundaries of the Arctic Circle, or a remote island in the Pacific? Perhaps it is the moon or a scene from a war-ravaged world in a sci-fi flick. It looks to be of the ages—an ancient and prehistoric landscape that even centuries of weathering couldn’t touch. Yet logically, we know it has just recently been constructed by the artist’s hands on the gallery floor, and to be made of the most fragile and delicate substance.

It is not the hardened earth we visit that will crunch beneath our boots. It is the lightest gossamer we have created that could wilt under our own breath. Mixed with flour, it is also of that which sustains us.

It is our bread, our way of life—a blending of the charred remains of that which sustains and that which has the potential to destroy. We eat it; we know it. We have sought after the greenest pastures in which to cultivate it; and it only exists because we have traversed the land and deemed it to be so.

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Audience interacting with Ossia 3 (top) Heather Clark Hilliard, Ossia 2 (detail), 2016, silk organza, metallic silk, plant dyes, fire, birch panel, audio recordings with headphones of musical interpretation, musician: Marrell Sanders, bass and saxophone (bottom)

HEATHER CLARK HILLIARD Ossia is a musical term that translates as an alternate way to play a passage. When I began this project I had been researching the 12-tone theory—a music theory developed as a method to compose atonal music in order to break away from the traditions of harmonic tones. What fascinated me about the 12-tone theory was the way “music” could be dissected into matrices and composed into endless geometric line drawings based on the order of notes. As the project developed I wanted to break away from these formalities and explore the interaction between the visual and aural senses.

There is an intimacy we experience when we tune into our senses. They inform us about the world we are navigating and each of us has our own experience, hence our alternate way to play the passage of life. Sounds are fleeting; one sound builds upon another to form a musical sentence or whatever the sound exposure may be. What followed in this project was a cross-pollination of the aural and visual, inviting the viewer to listen to musical interpretations of the visual abstract works.

In order to translate the three four-foot square panels into a “score” of music, I developed a set of principles to guide the musicians in their interpretations. These included note combinations, shapes, colors, emotion, and tempo. Because each of us interprets the world slightly differently, each musician’s interpretation of my set of principles changes with each recorded performance.

Ossia 2 (detail) (top) Heather Clark Hilliard, Ossia 2, 2016, silk organza, metallic silk, plant dyes, fire, birch panel, audio recordings with headphones of musical interpretation, musician: Marrell Sanders, bass and saxophone (bottom)

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Ossia 3 (musician: Marrell Sanders, saxophone), Ossia 1 (musicians: Klair Larason, guitar and xylophone; Marrell Sanders, bass), Ossia 2 (musician: Marrell Sanders, bass and saxophone) panels 48" x 48" x 2"; music scores 11" x 14" (left to right)

HEATHER CLARK HILLIARD // response by Lauren Scarpello

Like the skeletons of Spanish moss clinging to the arms of a bald cypress, Hilliard’s swaths of shredded silk find anchorage in three similar yet disparate musical tracks. The silks, dyed with plant materials of rich berry red, burnt umber brown, and cerulean blue, were synesthetically willed into being via Hilliard’s research on the 12-tone theory. As evidence of the process, these works reveal the concept-driven investigation, yet manage to strike a visceral chord.

Experiencing Hilliard’s compositions elicits a wholeness that washes over the observer in an auditory and visual umami. They contain just a bit of uncertainty, which leaves enough room for the participant to bring their own plot line and memories to the table. Thus, the marriage of sound and color becomes an analog virtual reality experience. For me? Ossia 1 takes me on a boat through a deep Southern brackish bayou where our perception of time slows down. Ossia 2 is like taking comfort in your own bed as a child and slowly watching the low winter light of late afternoon give way to the moon and stars.

Ossia 3 brags of the human impulse to repeat the same actions again and again, expecting a different outcome, because of the laws of nature and nurture that govern within. Or maybe that is the sum total of all three works—try as we might, the way we see the world is interdependent upon what the world speaks to us.

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COLE LU // Odds and Ends, 2016, three pieces of neon tubing with metal suspension frame, 25” x 85” (top) Odds and Ends (detail) (bottom)

COLE LU Utopia has always been a political issue, an unusual destiny for a literary form: yet just as the literary value of the form is subject to permanent doubt, so also its political status [is] structurally ambiguous.

– Frederic Jameson Introduction to Archaeologies of the Future (2005), xi.

I started my art practice with photography after having completed a degree in linguistics.

A photographer is literally someone who draws with light, writing and rewriting the world with illumination and shadow; a linguist is someone who scientifically studies language and its structure. I learned how visual meaning was constructed after I devoted myself full-time to art-making, realizing that perspective focuses everything on the eye of the beholder.

My work parses communication and miscommunication through various mediums. In Silent Message (1971), Albert Mehrabian concluded that ninety-three percent of all communicative language is non-verbal. If visual art is a kind of language, then, like any other language, it can be misused. The absent elements in an artwork are often more present to us, as that absent-ness acknowledges our identity as a fiction and provides us the illusion that we are present through a doubleedged self-consciousness. By creating sculptures that materialize sentiments such as the longing to engage and the craving to be understood, my practice accentuates the failure of cross-cultural languages. Appropriating readymade objects as a signifier for collective experience, I create sets for films that have never existed.

COLE LU // Rub, 2016, neon with metal suspension frame on Plexiglas, 31" x 24" (top) COLE LU // Thinking the word “somewhere” meditatively as both placeholder and ends (self-portrait), 2016, digital prints on vinyl banner, metal rod stands, 96" x 72"; pictured with Rub (bottom)

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COLE LU // response by Kirsten Olds

The neon chopsticks beckon, promising a generic Asian joint up the stairs. Yet the three-part graphic advertises not a restaurant or shop, but rather demonstrates a familiar action for many: how to hold chopsticks. Imagine the silliness of a related scenario, forks and knives packaged with instructions for use. A related work, Rub, installed inconspicuously on the floor, peddles a foot massage, with the simple gesture this time conveying seedy associations. Marshaling humor and keen observation in the packaging of the consumer sphere, Cole Lu’s work calls out cultural assumptions, thoughtless assimilation, and the uncritical search for utopia.

Lu’s art evinces her training in linguistics; she reveals our world as one made over into signs, systems for us to de- and re-code. Signs, by definition, point to things but Lu shows us ones that dead-end or accumulate into noise. Take her photo backdrop “self-portrait,” a fusion of multiple cultural residues, such as the bamboo chair swimming with a print of North American fish or the lightbox proffering a “rice burger,” the bun replaced by that Asian staple starch. The set-up itself suggests a paradise of sorts, signified by sandy beach, picturesque sunrise, and potted palm.

Yet there’s something dystopian about this fake paradise of cultural fusion. After all, it’s just a backdrop for our fantasies and stereotypes. Like the installation’s title, drawn from Tao Lin’s novel Taipei, Lu’s work gives us the state of identity today: pastiched from various traditions, suspended, in translation, between competing modes of communication.

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Concept Exhibition Main Gallery view with ANDY MAT TERN // Waiting, 2016, pigment ink prints, aluminum, motor

ANDY MATTERN My work investigates unintentional aspects of everyday experience and the limits of human control over technology and the built environment. Embedded in this effort is the question of how we organize and interact with the outside world, and what happens at the boundaries of our influence over it. Lately, I have found myself focusing on the spinning status graphic that appears on the computer screen when there is a problem. This moment of suspended animation is the inspiration for Waiting, a six-foot rotating color wheel based on the Apple graphic.

Despite our eagerness to embrace the new reality produced by the Internet and personal computing, we are yanked back into the corporeal present at these moments of failure, which leave us no option but to pause and stare.

ANDY MAT TERN // Waiting, 2016, pigment ink prints, aluminum, motor, 72" x 1"

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ANDY MATTERN // response by Kirsten Olds

It feels a bit like waiting for Godot, doesn’t it? Waiting, waiting, waiting… for nothing to happen. Andy Mattern’s rainbow-hued disk spins almost imperceptibly, at an agonizing pace of 1/6 RPM. It feels uncomfortably familiar, albeit slowed down. That’s because we’ve all watched a similar rotating circle, exasperatedly exclaiming at our screens, “What is it doing?!” or anthropomorphizing our devices, “Why is it still thinking? C’mon!”

But that’s just the surface to Waiting. More than playing with time, or chiding our hurry-up and wait approach, Mattern’s kinetic installation seems to exist in a hybrid space. He has enlarged, almost comically so, the millimeters-small wait cursor to human scale, deploying an Oldenburgian strategy of exaggeration. But perhaps even more jarring, the graphic, which exists in a virtual space of computing, has become physical, an inversion of states of being.

From afar it appears smooth, crisp, perfect. Yet when we approach, we notice minor dings, such as the lifted, obstinate point of the orange segment—small moments in the lifespan of a physical object that differentiate it from its virtual avatar. Even closer inspection reveals that the seemingly smooth surface is actually a photograph, baring the imperfections of its source imagery, a painted wall in Mattern’s studio. As a printed and mounted picture of a wall colored to resemble a computer graphic, Waiting is very meta! It oscillates in a space between the virtual and physical, 2D and 3D, real and abstract time, human and computer, and between what we see and what gets lost in the matrix.

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ANH-THUY NGUYEN // Citizenship (detail), 2016, installation and performance (top) ANH-THUY NGUYEN // Citizenship (detail with ID cards), 2016, installation and performance (bottom right) ANH-THUY NGUYEN // Citizenship (detail), 2016, installation and performance (bottom left)

ANH-THUY NGUYEN I am interested in exploring and documenting my and other people’s socio-cultural and physiological behaviors. Using my Vietnamese history and my experiences as an immigrant as resources, my work investigates personal and cultural identities.

I continuously search for ways to explore how I (Vietnamese) identify and label myself as a Vietnamese-American artist (I am yet an American.)

I began to look into Vietnamese and American cultural forms, especially in languages, means of communication and obtaining knowledge. During my immigration process, I have learned that in order to become a naturalized citizen, a permanent resident must pass the naturalization test, which includes an English and civics test.

The Citizenship project is my interpretation of documenting this naturalization process. It also expands my interest to screen prints and graphic design alongside with my primary approaches including photography, video, performance, and installation art.

The multi-media project is built upon my fascination of pass/fail measurements applied in the American system and relational aesthetics, the type of art that creates a social environment in which people come

ANH-THUY NGUYEN // Citizenship (detail with test taker participant), 2016, installation and performance

together to participate in a shared activity.

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ANH-THUY NGUYEN // Citizenship (detail with screenprints), 2016, installation and performance

ANH-THUY NGUYEN // response by Kirsten Olds

In today’s hybrid, global culture, what does citizenship look like? Can we actually see it marked on the body, in our stoic photo IDs? Do our surnames still signal our many heritages? Anh-Thuy Nguyen’s Citizenship asks these questions and invites us to consider what it means to belong in a country founded by immigrants.

The installation re-creates the highly regulated environment of a government checkpoint: cordoned off queue, paperwork, official signage and insignias, badges and identification cards, and even a stern officer, deftly played by Rogers State University student Kazoua Her on opening night. Hardesty’s glass Creative Studios setting creates both a sense of control and surveillance, funneling bodies through the demarcated line and subjecting them to the watchful eyes of others in the gallery. Willing participants take a truncated citizenship test, adapted from the same questions as on the actual U.S. naturalization exam. They range from the easy—the number of senators—to information perhaps forgotten from middle-school civics class—what are two Cabinet-level positions? For current American citizens, the consequences of failing are nil; no knowledge is needed to maintain one’s citizenship.

Accompanying Citizenship is the three-channel video Homework, in which we witness the artist’s own struggle with the duality of a hyphenated identity. Does migrating to one country require renouncing one’s birthplace or ancestry? As we move forward, with the metaphor of the melting pot ceding to talk of walled-off borders, Nguyen’s work offers us a simulated space in which to debate these issues anew.

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CATALINA OUYANG // Character Exercises, 2016, acrylic paint, cotton duck canvas, enamel paint, resin, 60" x 60" each (top left) CATALINA OUYANG // Blue Boys, 2015-2016, extruded polystyrene, gypsum, resin, plaster, steel, enamel paint, spray paint, pastel, dimensions variable (top right) Character Exercises (detail) (bottom)

CATALINA OUYANG What kind of bedfellows can memory and desire be? How do they joust, caress, repel, or require one another?

- David Lazar

A document might be described, in reductive terms, as a physical imprint of memory. As defined

by Richard Dienst, it is “both a historical thing, some mark made to order vision as soon as it was made, and a historical event, a spark of vision that organizes a world of relationships around it.” Between memory and history—sometimes intersecting, sometimes butting heads—things get fuzzy and weird. I am interested in that space: where my experience as a Chinese-American woman meshes with histories of cultural and sexual colonization, where my family’s transplanted history aligns with a larger narrative of displacement and lost communication. Working across disciplines and mediums, my work draws associations between ostensibly unrelated documents, or imprints, using my lived experiences to engage in oblique forms of critique and resistance.

CATALINA OUYANG // kittytuna (Ophelia), 2016, extruded polystyrene, fiberglass, aqua resin, gypsum, resin, MDF, spray paint, acrylic paint, 12" x 22" x 65"

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CATALINA OUYANG // response by Lauren Scarpello

Subjugated by desire, kittytuna (Ophelia) is a small, fetishized female effigy with an expression of emptiness and dread that belies the ambiguous blue-green color subsuming her (itself a nod to the historically recent distinction between the two colors in the Chinese language). The figure peers upward with piercing blue eyes, as she sinks downward into the floor—Ouyang’s apt reminder of the sexual idealizations of both the subservient Asian “doll” and the Western blue-eyed paradigm.

Above her, on the second floor of the gallery are the Blue Boys. The four oversized white glans are deceptive in their malicious cuteness. Their cartoony blue eyes seem to implore you to act on your Thanatosian urge to touch, but you may lose your hand if you do. They are the charming pets you bring home from the store that will wreak havoc, should you not follow the rules and get them wet. Staked into their orifices are uncanny oral and tactile implements bent in the gestures of Chinese characters that seemed to have leapt off of the canvases from the wall behind. The canvases are modeled after boxes from Chinese writing exercise books and tongue-shaped swaths of fabric are carved out to wag open and reveal the interior imagery, as well as some hidden truths from the other side. Upon closer inspection, we see four-line poems in English dancing throughout, sometimes appearing backwards, as a bizarre interruption on this cultural space.

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THE CENTER IS A MOVING TARGET

ERIN DZIEDZIC // Director of Curatorial Affairs, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri In 2013, a panel at The Armory Show in New York addressed “the question of regionalism” as part of its Open Forum. It was at the same time out of context and completely relevant to discuss regionalism related to contemporary curating in America in one of the country’s most significant art centers. Moderated by Isolde Brielmaier, the panel included Stuart Horodner, Sandra JacksonDumont, Dominic Molon, and Ruba Katrib, who at the time were all leading and/or curating at institutions outside of perceived hubs like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. They represented Savannah, Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, Seattle, Washington, St. Louis, Missouri, and Long Island City, New York respectively. Their discussion, although brief, laid the groundwork for further query on what it meant to be of a region (whether born there or introduced to it through their respective positions) and to explore it from a variety of curatorial perspectives. Collectively among the panelists, there was an ongoing dialogue on the negotiations between a sense of regional art practice and global perspectives. It is a conversation that was immediately relevant to me, and one I’ve long been exploring on multiple platforms—editing, writing, curating, and discussion—traveling with me from living and working in the Southeast, and now in the Midwest.

As guest editor for the May/June 2013 issue of Art Papers magazine (based in Atlanta, Georgia) I asked the same Armory panel group to reconvene electronically, where they could elaborate on some of the ideas shared earlier in the year. Additionally, in 2014 I initiated a series of three exhibitions (two of which have taken place), where I pulled from some of the topics addressed such as architecture, artist communities, mobility, and technology to begin to engage regionalism in curatorial practice at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. These varying forms of dialogue aim to question and critique the elusive concept of regionalism in contemporary art practice.

This essay is a layer of the thread of conversations and exhibitions prompted by the Armory panel. I was unfamiliar with the context of the Midwest, and Kansas City in particular, before moving here in the spring of 2013. I had a desire to make sense of the kaleidoscopic array of new information flooding in—exhibition and collecting history of the Kemper Museum, local audience and the region’s geographical reach, the pioneering history of the artistic movement of Regionalism and the flourishing community of contemporary artists. Having engaged in a dialogue with regionalism through these connected disciplines I’ve come to better understand the modern significance of what historian Kenneth Frampton refers to as a site of Critical Regionalism. Whereas it is impossible to suppress a certain universality in art that has swept across the country, there are methods of inscribing onto a site by which exhibiting artists living and working in a region activate through exploring, transcribing, and questioning in their work.

In his book Postmodern Geographies, Edward W. Soja recognizes regionalism’s elusiveness and therefore a need to address the regional question. He applies an “interpretive context” of the historical geography of capitalism to examine the intervals of regionalization.1 Space—the desire for capitalist expansion—put physical and psychological distance between the megalopolis and the rural, creating a dichotomous global structure of core-periphery.2 He notes that “regionalism rooted only in resistance to the homogenization of cultural traditions” of the nineteenth century has shifted. As a result, Soja posits that multiple forms of regionalism responded by resisting, reorganizing, demanding more, and creating redirection that have “repoliticized the regional question as a more general spatial question.”3 A mode of answering the decentralized regional-spatial geography question is rooted in the progressive social forces of society taking agency of restructuring space.

In America, the Depression era saw the cultural fascination and appropriation of European arts and culture subdued by people’s interest in moving away from the metropolises and into other regions of the Midwest, Southwest, or farther to the Northeast. In

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Concept Exhibition upstairs at Hardesty Arts Center with JASON WILSON // Going Up; and COLE LU // Odds and Ends (top) Concept Exhibition upstairs at Hardesty Arts Center with ANGELA PIEHL // Ingress; BRIAN DEHART // Head of a Woman [From Antiquity]; and HEATHER CLARK HILLIARD // Ossia 3, Ossia 1, Ossia 2 (left to right)

the Midwest regionalist artists Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Kansas City, Missouri, and John Steuart Curry living and working in Kansas believed that there was still culture to be found outside of city centers and promoted the richness of material they were able to garner from these areas as being authentic subject matter like rural landscapes, portraits, and allegorical scenes depicting American laborers. In a 1935 pamphlet titled Revolt Against the City, Wood stated, “America has turned introspective” and “the Depression Era has stimulated us to a re-evaluation of our resources in both art and economics, and that this turning of our eyes inward upon ourselves has awakened us to values which were little known before the grand crash of 1929 and which are chiefly non-urban.”4 Wood’s manifesto recognizes the capitalist benchmark of the stock market crash in tandem with an artistic shift toward regionalist subjects and a new aesthetic. In Kansas City, Benton’s mark on painting history in the area is strong and certainly evokes a rural prominence. As the Kansas City Art Institute has continued to flourish, local museums are strong in their collecting and exhibition histories, and studio space is available. More and more artists have for several decades been turning toward the urban core to live, work, and find inspiration, and even more so over the past several years as Google and other businesses find a home and bring jobs and growth to the “Silicon Prairie.”

There is of course the misconception set by the core-periphery structure that situates power and productivity in the center and sentimental or nostalgic perception farther away from a capitalist hub. In shifting geographies, however, the ebb and flow of regionalisms largely perpetuated by the decentralization or recentralization of capitalist labor create a new geography.

Panelist Jackson-Dumont’s belief that “while the gravitational pull of NYC is tremendous, the center is a moving target” illustrates the periodical fluctuations of regionalism’s dynamic in contemporary art from a linear to spatial conception that Soja posits in his theories on postmodern geography.5 Rather than ascribing regionalism with nostalgic resonance, Frampton’s etymology evokes a Critical Regionalism, a mediation between “the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place.”6 Critical Regionalism acknowledges the entirety of world culture for which it is a part; then through form, material, and location, it manifests critique of the universal.7 The first exhibition in the series The Center Is a Moving Target (admirably borrowed from Jackson-Dumont’s quote) at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presented recent two- and three-dimensional and time-based media works by 12 artists who reside within a 20-mile radius of the Crossroads district of Kansas City, Missouri curator-appointed region. The exhibition engaged Kansas City and its artists in the challenging question of regionalism, philosophically keeping in mind a quote from Harwell Hamilton Harris (1903–1990), an American modernist architect,

Opposed to the Regionalism of Restriction is another type of regionalism, the Regionalism of Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. We call such a manifestation “regional” only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere.8

The Midwest has often been distinguished by its geographic location and realist particularities deeply associated with Regionalism. By creating a “new” region the exhibition became about the space—of the gallery and the work produced in this selected geographic location. Together, the works in The Center Is a Moving Target enliven the dialogue about what creates a region, community, and arena for artistic invention and action today. They welcome the notion that the center of the contemporary art world is a shifting and ever-elusive target, as Jackson-Dumont emphasized in her written responses to the question of regionalism.

The second exhibition, The Center Is a Moving Target: If You Lived (T)here, addressed the history and peculiarities of place in projects that explore architectural concepts of our time. The region then expanded to include artists living and working within

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THE CENTER IS A MOVING TARGET // CONTINUED

a 200-mile radius of Kansas City along a central corridor of the Midwest—from Iowa, through Kansas City, and to Oklahoma.

Artists’ works demonstrated connections with expanded architectural themes and inspirations such as site, geography, materials, light, and space while responding individually to the physical, social, and psychological nuances that are unique to the artists’ environments and experiences. In essence, this exhibition was meant to address views toward a manifestation of regionalism expressed here as broad perspectives traced by the fundamental principles of architecture. These ideological connections in context with an expanded view of works from across parts of the United States have spurred conversations on possibly exploring meta-, neo-, or post-regionalisms in future exhibitions.

Art critic Lucy Lippard reminds us that “a sense of place is symbolically related to a sense of displacement.”9 The mapping radius used as a curatorial framework in The Center Is a Moving Target functions as a way of understanding that a place “exists somewhere between the inside and the outside view of them, the ways in which they compare to, and contrast with, other places,” as Lippard notes.10 Also, that this geographical marker is in a sense virtual, that the experiences, movement, and engagement with a place is permeable and certainly temporal. For example, several of the artists with whom I was working in these curator-designated regions moved elsewhere during the planning of the exhibition, while others often lived and worked for long periods of time outside of this “region” and completed and/or stored their work inside the radius. There were at times subtle shifts between Kansas City and another place/time that were evident in works, and others that were significantly more overt. For example, Diana Heise’s deep mapping project of the oral history of the ravann drum on the island of Mauritius was influenced by William Least Heat-Moon’s traces of time and space in his account of Chase County, Kansas, in his 1991 American classic book PrairyErth. While she did research, recorded, photographed, and participated in an intense cultural immersion in Mauritius, her intentions have always been to find space in Kansas City to reflect, edit, and compose her own topology of the ravann drum.

Some people stay in one place their whole life; others travel to discover many senses of place; and still others find their own sacred niche wherever they are. Similar to Heise, the sense of being in a place is also important to Lippard, Soja, and Frampton.

Whether analyzing this idea from a phenomenological “sense of place” or an ontological and epistemological “layering of a site,” the engagement with regionalism remains critical and questionable. The region delineates a state of mind. Exhibitions like The Center Is a Moving Target suggest multicentered regions and also ask the question: Where is Kansas City? It is relevant in art and curatorial practice both to ask these questions and to explore their multiple configurations through a range of exhibition-making.

In his written responses to Brielmaier’s panel questions, curator Dominic Molon acknowledges the element of balance.

Rather than disavowing a site or region for its position in the contemporary art world he reminds us that it’s not an “either/or question” of who is leading the discourse “but rather arguments for how regional practices, again, balance the establishment of a dialogue between that region and the larger world.” Also, that it is counterproductive to “valorize regionally produced work as some sort of ‘alternative’ to a perceived modishness of the centers” as it is “equally problematic to disavow regional or locally developed sensibilities as irrelevant or trivial in relationship to a more centralized discourse.”11 The flux in geography of a region is affected significantly by urbanization, political dialectics, immigration and migration, capitalism, and technology, in which we can follow the shifting patterns of regionalism. Beautifully unstable, the flexibility, spatiality, and time of a place illuminate regions, regionalization, and regionalism as part of the existing fabric of our broad and deep culture. Regionalisms are about speaking to the specificity of a locale: all of its origins, idiosyncrasies, appropriations, and amalgamations. After all, the center is a moving target.

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THE CENTER IS A MOVING TARGET // CONTINUED

1Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso: London and New York, 1989), 164.

2Ibid., 165.

3Ibid., 173.

4Grant Wood, "Revolt Against the City," in Grant Wood, A Study in American Art and Culture, James Dennis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1086), 229.

5“A Discussion on ‘Regionalism,’” Art Papers, May/June 2013, pg. 14.

6Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Point for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture ed. Hall Foster (The New Press: New York, 1998), 23.

7Ibid.

8Harwell Hamilton Harris, “Liberative and Restrictive Regionalism.” Address given to the Northwest Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Eugene, Oregon, in 1954; published as “Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture,” in Texas Quarterly 1 (February 1958): 115–24.

9Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1998), 33.

10Ibid.

11“A Discussion on ‘Regionalism,’” Art Papers, May/June 2013, pg. 15.

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MARILYN ARTUS // OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Her Flag: Number 3 - 2016, mixed media with hand and machine embroidery, 24" x 36" Her Flag: Number 3 is part of a new series I have recently started. I am taking the US flag and using it as a vehicle to explore being a woman in America. I created this piece by machine sewing the materials onto vinyl then adding hand-sewn details. Next, I lay the piece on the birch panel box and cover the piece in three layers of art resin. The edges of the vinyl disappear after the resin is applied, creating the floating look of the sewn flag.

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STUART ASPREY // NORMAN, OK

EXCELLENCE IN ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Hangover Helper (Lidded Jar) - 2014, English porcelain with colored slip, 16" x 9" x 9" Hangover Helper was conceived while reading about Caligula and his reign over the Roman Empire. It is thought that during his time fried canaries were a prescribed remedy for overindulging with Bacchus the previous night. This bit of intriguing information led to further scholarly activity to unearth other cultural tonics, elixirs, and other common cures for combating a night out with liquid courage.

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RANDALL BARNES // MIDWEST CITY, OK The Thirty-Sixth Chamber - 2015, woodcut-painting, 24" x 48" Thirty-Sixth Chamber is a woodcut-painting depicting the heroic details of the “Red Shirt Collective,” a group of heroic kung fu artisans as graffiti removers. Graffiti removal is commonly known as “the buff” and can be found in and around nooks throughout the urban landscape. I am fascinated in the complexity of the buff—from the social and political implications of redacting graffiti, to its value as an alternative version of public art.

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TRACEY BEWLEY // OKLAHOMA CITY, OK

AWARD OF MERIT

Strange Shadows Series: Arched Window - 2015, fused and sand-etched glass, steel, walnut, pewter, 12" x 8" x 12" These pieces started with my fascination for ravens. I have to admit to being an Edgar Allen Poe fan, so the settings for the birds just came together.

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STEVE BREERWOOD // MOORE, OK The Kiss Principle, Stupid - 2014, oil on canvas, 48" x 48" I was a songwriter before I started painting. Consequently, I find that the execution of my concepts are often rooted in literary devises like allegory and rhythm. The Kiss Principle, Stupid is from my Song Paintings series in which songs that I have written are reinterpreted into visual form. The lyrical and formal content of the original song is converted into the representational and abstract qualities of the painting. This particular painting adapts themes associating the nature of time with our carnal nature as human beings, likening the passage of time to recording a track on some cosmic vinyl record. If our actions are fixed and reverberating for eternity, let’s cut a track we’d like to play over and over again (hint, hint, wink, wink).

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CYNTHIA BROWN // TULSA, OK Moment of Zen - 2016, acrylic and mixed media, 36" x 36" Moment of Zen is part of a series of intuitive paintings I have been exploring for the past three years. Layers of paint and marks are built up on the canvas, constructing, deconstructing, adding, subtracting, veiling, and excavating to arrive at a satisfying place to rest.

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JASON CYTACKI // NORMAN, OK Somewhere Else - 2016, oil on linen, 30" x 25" This piece is part of a current project that explores secret lairs and hidden places often found in childhood stories of adventure. In my paintings, I imbue these spaces with a stillness or vacancy where the heroic stories acted out within the walls are only recalled as ghosts. An increasing sense of melancholy and nostalgia looms— the seams are showing and the magic is fading.

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BRIAN DEHART // TULSA, OK Head of a Woman [From Antiquity] - 2015, charcoal, ink and inkjet on paper, 18" x 14" Head of a Woman (From Antiquity) is part of a series of drawings on paper that feature portrait-type figures combined with abstract forms. The drawing was created using traditional drawing materials including charcoal and drawing ink, and digital tools such as Photoshop and inkjet printer.

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GINNA DOWLING // NORMAN, OK

AWARD OF MERIT

Excerpts from More Than Gaelic: A Printmaker’s Guide to Finding Her Heritage - linocut, yupo, ink, grommets, waxed, Irish linen bookbinding thread, 23" x 28" each

These excerpts are part of an installation that chronicles my 2015 artist-in-residency in Ireland. Inspired by ancient megalithic art, ideology, and Gaelic heritage, which is enmeshed in contemporary global culture, the carved and printed glyphs translate into words and phrases telling a literary story of my journey. The original installation exhibited with 65+ glyphs printed on 45 pages, bound into fifteen 7.5' panels, and spanned 75 feet.

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YIREN GALLAGHER // TULSA, OK In the Wind - 2016, charcoal, ink, white paint on paper, 22" x 30" individually I want to capture movement rather than light. It was a sunny but windy day, the shadows of a long needle pine moved frantically across the wall. With the same speed, I traced the movement of pine needles, branches, and limbs proving a tree can run as well.

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GRACE GROTHAUS GRIMM // TULSA, OK Abeyance - 2016, LED light, acrylic paint, acrylic and mylar panel, molded polyester, 36" x 12" x 6" We live in a post-digital world where the line between real life and virtual life is increasingly blurred. My chosen medium echoes that message. Abeyance, from the series Sunlit, is a blend of analog production techniques and microprocessor-driven custom electronics.

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GEOFFREY HICKS // TULSA, OK

EXCELLENCE IN ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Variagraph 9-27 - 2016, gelatin silver print, 60" x 40" This gelatin silver print, or Variagraph as I have named it, is created using a motion controlled robotic platform of my design that enables a long exposure to be taken while the camera pulls back and adjusts the focal length and focus of the lens in synchronicity with the movement to maintain the subject’s size and position in the center of the film frame. The camera movement, coupled with the precise adjustments of the lens, creates a unique distortion leaving behind artifacts from light traveling through varied focal lengths into one image. I am using this process to create a series of figure portraits captured on black & white film and printed life-size in the darkroom. Â

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MICHELLE HIMES-MCCRORY // STILLWATER, OK Twisted Branch with Living Shadow - 2014, acrylic on mahogany, 11" x 14" This painting is part of my recent body of work, Living Shadows. The subjects depicted are all items collected near my home. Beneath the found objects, the shadows take on an entire life of their own with hidden scenery inspired

by Oklahoma landscapes.

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AKIKO JACKSON // TULSA, OK mottainai: from the coil series - 2016, artist’s old spring mattress, ink, gold leaf, 96" x 12" x 6" Affordable and discarded material is used to reference cultural traditions in my art practice. Braiding hair, tying knots, casting multiples, sewing and stitching, mending cracks, forming and re-forming clay, breaking and re-using, highlighting the unseen, are some greater assertions of cultural identity and tradition preservation seen in my body of work. Black and gold are used as a set of driving principles, informed by theories of otherness, Japanese aesthetic, kintsugi, and mottainai.

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MARY KETCH // NORMAN, OK Dreaming of Caramels - 2015, oil on canvas, 18" x 24" In our fast-paced, information-laden world, sensuality often gets overlooked since it requires moments of quiet, sideways thinking. Dreaming of Caramels was part of my series Husbands, Wives and Lovers.

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MANDY MESSINA // OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Greencard - 2015, embroidery, 18" x 24" Japanese Visa - 2015, embroidery, 18" x 24" - Texas Driver’s License - 2016, embroidery, 18" x 24" My work explores ideas around systems and the individual’s role within these structures. Recent work focuses on the aesthetics of points of access, like these embroideries of my migration documents. These have served as tokens of entry into spaces, as well as reflections of assimilation into particular societies through imitation of their aesthetic norms.

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MOLLY MURPHY-ADAMS // TULSA, OK Form-Series 2 - 2016, beadwork on bristol board, 18" x 24" This installation is a work in progress exploring basic shapes and colors in multiples. The series can be installed in many different configurations and patterns creating a multitude of interpretations. In addition to the pattern of the beadwork on paper, there is a secondary pattern in the shadows cast from the panels and stark lighting creating another layer of geometry.

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ANGELA PIEHL // STILLWATER, OK Ingress - 2015, oil on panel, 18" x 24" Angela Piehl’s paintings and drawings offer a hybridization of aesthetic orders—synthetic and organic, flora and fauna, and bodily and constructed forms. Piehl’s work is described as decoratively abstract, suggesting bouquet-like arrangements as well as creatures and forms inspired from nature. Angela Piehl asks viewers to question preconceived notions of nature and beauty, and to consider the relationship between accumulation and the feeling of alienation from nature.

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STEPHANIE PINKSTON // BROKEN ARROW, OK Siblings - 2015, oil on wood, 40" x 50" Siblings is a visual representation of identifying with the two cultures in which I was raised, the differences between me and my own sibling, and finding balance somewhere in-between. This piece is one in a series of paintings.

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HALEY PRESTIFILIPPO // NORMAN, OK We Couldn’t Wait - 2015, graphite on paper, 6" x 8" This image is part of a series of very small, ornately framed graphite pieces exploring themes concerning the space between life and death and the relationship between regeneration and decay. Here, the subject matter and ornate frame are meant to evoke the sense of a Baroque still life and the concept of memento mori. This piece offers an intimate experience for the viewer and hopefully allows a moment of meditation on these subjects.

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KIM RICE // NORMAN, OK

CURATOR’S CHOICE AWARD

Redlining - 2016, HOLC maps, magazines, red tape, 7' x 13' I explore whiteness because I see it as a missing link in the conversation on race. This matters because we cannot reason the role the white race plays in our lives until we can collectively see that it exists. My work explores whiteness as a social construct created through the illusion of ordinariness, symbolism, and institutional power structures such as media, education, the judicial system, and property.

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LIZ ROTH // STILLWATER, OK

CURATOR’S CHOICE AWARD

Oklahoma Landscape (Salt Water Disposal Well) - 2016, oil on canvas, 30" x 48" Oklahoma Landscape (Gas Wells) - 2016, oil on canvas, 30" x 48" These paintings are from Whose Fault? which is a series of representational oil paintings depicting the pastoral beauty of the Oklahoma landscape—punctuated by horizontal drilling wells, salt disposal wells, and other physical evidence of our oil and gas industry. These paintings depict the equipment whose use has been scientifically proven to induce seismicity.

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PARKER SEWARD // STILLWATER, OK Shoplifting In a Ghost Town - charcoal and pastel on paper, 36" x 24" The piece Shoplifting In a Ghost Town belongs to a larger body of work which narrates and gives life to the poem Dinosauria, We by Charles Bukowski, a post-modernist writing that describes how, through our own actions, humans have created a world that is slowly decaying. Shoplifting In a Ghost Town depicts an individual who has simply given up, and resigned herself to a life of self-created misery.

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BYRON SHEN // SKIATOOK, OK Your Eyes Close with My Dreams - 2016, oil on canvas, 24" x 48" Currently, my work has been based upon a dialogue with poetry and painting. My undergraduate studies were in English with a focus on creative writing while my graduate studies were in painting and drawing. Using poems by famous poets like Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, etc. as a departure point, I allow my intuition to take over while feeling the rhythms and images that the poems form in my being. Writing parts of the poems and having the text sit upon and show through the paint allows for a call and response interaction between the mediums of poetry and painting.

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CECILIA VILLALOBOS // SKIATOOK, OK Tamed Inheritance - 2016, oil on canvas, 24" x 36" This painting is an exploration of body image and the way that a woman’s view of her body is shaped by the views of the women around her. It also playfully challenges what society sees as sensual or personal.

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GEORGE WILSON // OKLAHOMA CITY, OK I’ll never get that right in the dark - 2016, red cedar, marble, granite, and titanium, 52" x 25" x 12" As a work of art, this piece presents a construction technique that focuses on chaos in structure. Randomness that is really not so random.

The use and choice of materials is very deliberate for their qualities of lightness, strength, and inherent symbolic content.

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JASON WILSON // HARTSHORNE, OK Going Up - 2014, acrylic, 36" x 36" Colored blocks explode outward from the center of a black background. After reading the title, the viewer discovers he is looking down at skyscrapers. Mentally flying, the unease of vertigo overtakes his senses.

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CURATOR ADAM WELCH is an artist, musician, and curator who has exhibited regionally and internationally. He is the recipient of the 2009 Individual Artists Fellowship in Installation/Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and was awarded the 2008 Emerging Artist of the Year award by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. From 2008-2015 he served as the curator at Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts where he curated over 60 solo and group exhibitions of regional and national artists. Also during this time, he organized over 30 group and solo exhibits of regional guilds, associations and international artists. Some curated group exhibitions of note: 2014 Pittsburgh Biennial, Have a Nice Day, 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial, Context Ingeminate, and Cluster. Welch holds an MFA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BA from SUNY Stony Brook University.

ESSAYISTS ERIN DZIEDZIC is director of curatorial affairs at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Recent exhibitions include Adam Cvijanovic: American Montage and A Whisper of Where It Came From. Forthcoming exhibitions include Siah Armajani: Bridge Builder and José Lerma: La Venida Cansa Sin Ti. Dziedzic is founder/editor of the online contemporary art journal, artcore journal www.artcorejournal.net KIRSTEN OLDS is assistant professor of art history at the University of Tulsa. Her research focuses on conceptual, mail art, video, performance, and social art practices since the 1960s, and her essays have appeared in Art Journal, Journal of Fandom Studies, and Art Practical. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan.

LAUREN SCARPELLO is associate director of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition in Oklahoma City. She holds an MA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from SUNY Geneseo. An independent curator and art writer, her writing has appeared in Pelican Bomb, as well as Art Focus Oklahoma—of which she currently serves as editor.

FOCUS ARTISTS GLENN HERBERT DAVIS is a function-fiction maker whose work is primarily focused on issues of the individual body and the systems to which it is subject. Davis was gallery director and taught at the University of Tulsa, Ohio University, and Iowa State University, and was lead preparator and operations manager of Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis. He received three OVAC fellowships and grants in 2010 and 2006, and Jerome Foundation grants in 1998 and 1996. Davis currently teaches photography online and resides “six miles south” in West Tulsa with his gal, her gal, their gal, and four dogs enduring eight cats.

ADDOLEY DZEGEDE is a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist living in St. Louis. Her practice is idea-driven, mixed media, and investigates notions of belonging, home, and identity. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and she was an artist-in-residence at Arteles Creative Center in Finland and Foundation Obras in Portugal. She received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, and was awarded a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, where she completed an MFA degree in visual art in 2015. Last year, she was a post-graduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

MEREDITH FOSTER is an Illinois-based artist whose creative practice is responsive to the complex relationships between humans and nature. Holding an MFA in visual art from Washington University in St. Louis and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her work was been published in New American Paintings and has received awards including an Illinois Arts Council Grant and an Urbana Public Arts Grant. She exhibits both locally and nationally with exhibitions at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN, COCA in St. Louis, the South Bend Museum of Art in Indiana, and most recently at the University of Illinois School of Art + Design Gallery. She teaches visual art at Thomas Jefferson School in Sunset Hills, MO. HEATHER CLARK HILLIARD is a multi-disciplinary artist focusing on conceptual fiber and site-specific installations. Solo exhibitions include the Oklahoma State Capitol and an artist-in-residence exhibit at 108 Contemporary. Her work has been in regional and national exhibitions in ten states including Amarillo Museum of Art’s Biennial 600: Sculpture. In 2014 Hilliard was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant Program and has received Awards of Merit as well as Studio Assistantship Awards to study at Penland School of Crafts. Her work has been published in Surface Design Journal and Art Focus Oklahoma.

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COLE LU received her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Lu has worked simultaneously as artist and curator. Lu’s work has been exhibited at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Pulitzer Arts Foundation; Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; CENTRAL BOOKING ART SPACE, New York, NY; Museo De Arte De Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, and The 3rd New Digital Art Biennale—The Wrong (Again).

Her artist book Smells Like Content (2015) is in the collection of MoMA The Museum of Modern Art Library. She is the assistant director at the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts forum fort gondo compound for the arts.

ANDY MATTERN is a visual artist whose work focuses on the unintentional aspects of everyday experience and the limits of human control. His work has been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Photo Center NW in Seattle, The Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and the Photographic Centre Peri in Turku, Finland. He holds an MFA in photography from the University of Minnesota and a BFA in studio art from the University of New Mexico. He is currently an assistant professor of photography and digital media at Oklahoma State University.

ANH-THUY NGUYEN continuously searches for ways to explore how she identifies and labels herself as a Vietnamese-American artist. She looks into both Vietnamese and American cultural forms, especially in language, a means of communication and obtaining knowledge. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally including Video Holica International Video Art Festival, Varna, Bulgaria (2012), 2nd Montone International Biennial, Italy (2013), Texas Biennial (2011) and Tulsa Biennial (2015). Nguyen’s performance work was selected for Arizona Biennial (2013) at the Tucson Museum of Art. Her photography work has been featured in the Society for Photographic Education catalog. Nguyen received an MFA in photography and video from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a BFA in photography from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She is currently an assistant professor of photography at Rogers State University in Claremore, OK. CATALINA OUYANG is a transient visual artist and writer based currently in St. Louis. She is the recipient of the 2015 Jeffrey Wacks Award, the 2015 CURA Prize, the 2015 Caroline Risque Janis Prize in Sculpture and the 2011 Elizabeth Greenshields Grant. Her visual work has been exhibited in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Annapolis, Florence, and throughout New Jersey. She was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and her writing appears in River Teeth Journal, CURA Literary Magazine, Please Hold Magazine, and Pearl Girl Magazine. She received her BFA in sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2015.

SURVEY ARTISTS MARILYN ARTUS explores the female experience in her works. She has created shows that explore the suffragette era in the US, paid tribute to burlesque performers, and continuously collides with the many different stereotypes that women navigate through on a daily basis. Marilyn was the first to receive the annual Brady Craft Alliance Award for Innovation in fiber arts in 2011 and in 2010 led an art-making workshop at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in association with the retrospective exhibit Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968. marilynartus.com STUART ASPREY was born in England, raised in California, and currently resides in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife and their twin boys. He is an assistant professor of ceramics at the University of Oklahoma. He recently presented a lecture at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts annual conference and will be teaching a workshop at the Anderson Ranch Art Center. aspreyart.com RANDALL BARNES is a community arts practitioner in Oklahoma City. Randall received his BFA from Oklahoma State University. His woodcut-paintings discuss the aesthetics of graffiti removal as a form of public art. Randall is interested in the social and political implications of redacting graffiti. rs-barnes.com TRACEY BEWLEY has been working with fused glass for approximately 13 years. She has been collaborating with her husband, Rick Bewley, in creating mixedmedia sculptures using her glass with other materials for most of that time. In this series she also includes sand-etching to give the “shadows” depth and realism. artfusionstudio.com STEVE BREERWOOD holds an MFA from Florida State University and a BA from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. He lives in Moore and teaches oil painting and drawing at the University of Central Oklahoma. Breerwood’s work often deals with matters of human identity and place within time and history. stevebreerwood.com

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SURVEY ARTISTS // CONTINUED CYNTHIA BROWN was born and raised in Tulsa where she currently resides. Brown earned her BFA and MFA from the University of Tulsa. After teaching high school art for ten years she decided to pursue painting as a full-time career, painting from her studio in Owen Park. cynthiaannebrown.com JASON CYTACKI is an assistant professor of painting at the University of Oklahoma. Jason earned an MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2011, his BFA from IUSB in 2009, and now lives and works in Norman, Oklahoma. jasoncytacki.com BRIAN DEHART received an MFA from Cornell University and a BFA from Oklahoma State University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in cities including New York and Shanghai. His work was featured in New American Paintings. He lives in Tulsa. briandehart.com GINNA DOWLING is the fifth Oklahoma woman artist in three consecutive generations of family. An MFA from the University of Oklahoma and a BA in journalism provide a framework for her printmaking and storytelling installations. Images, glyphs, symbols, patterns, or words create a symbolic narrative for viewers to ponder and translate within a creative environment. ginnadowling.com A native of Taiwan, YIREN GALLAGHER is an immigrant artist. She holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and has been an involved public high school teacher in Tulsa from 2000-2016. Yiren works with her husband James on many of their large installation projects. She has recently retired from teaching to focus on art-making. yirengallagher.com GRACE GROTHAUS GRIMM is a multidisciplinary artist primarily interested in moments in which analog and digital experiences are blurred. She earned her BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute double-majoring in interdisciplinary art and art history and her graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma were in art and technology. Exhibitions of her work include the 2nd World Creativity Biennale in Rio de Janeiro. gracegrothausgrimm.com GEOFFREY HICKS is a visual artist living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is currently interested in exploring the integration of digital technology with traditional art-making practices. geoffreyhicks.com MICHELLE HIMES-MCCRORY is from Oklahoma, though she has lived in six states around the country. She started her art education at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and then graduated from Oklahoma State University in 2005. Michelle works out of her studio in Stillwater, OK and is currently teaching summer drawing courses at Oklahoma State University. michellehm.com AKIKO JACKSON is a visual artist living and working in Tulsa, OK with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, GKFF. Her work addresses materiality and its connection to cultural identity, tradition preservation, and notions of otherness and belonging. Jackson holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts; and an MA from California State University—Northridge, Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication. akikojackson.com MARY JAMES-KETCH holds an MFA from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and received a BA from the University of Oklahoma.

She paints scenes inspired both by her daily life and also of the magic, weather, and history of her native Oklahoma. maryjamesketch.com MANDY MESSINA is an interdisciplinary artist from South Africa, where they graduated with a BFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art (Cape Town) in 2009. Messina serves in several arts educator capacities at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma Contemporary, and independently at Next Door Studios OKC. mandymessina.com MOLLY MURPHY-ADAMS completed her BFA at the University of Montana in 2004. Murphy-Adams draws on her background in traditional sewing, beading, and fiber arts and combines these techniques with modern materials and design. Originally from Montana, she is currently a Tulsa resident splitting her time as an exhibiting artist and fine art appraiser. mollymurphybeads.com

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ANGELA PIEHL was born near Houston, TX in 1975. She pursued her BFA at the University of Texas in Austin, and her MFA in studio art at the University of Arizona. Piehl is currently an Associate Professor of Painting, Drawing & Digital Art at Oklahoma State University. Her work has been exhibited widely at the national and international level. angelapiehl.com STEPHANIE PINKSTON was born and raised in Osage County; she currently resides in Broken Arrow with her family. She received her graphic design degree from OSU-IT and currently works as an art director and designer for Cherokee Nation Businesses.

HALEY PRESTIFILIPPO earned her BFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2009 followed in 2010 with an MA from Eastern Illinois University. Her work deals with themes of evolution, creation and decay, and interdependence in a literal sense as well as metaphorical. She currently works primarily using graphite on paper. haleyprestifilippo.com KIM RICE earned her MFA in printmaking from the University of Oklahoma. Her work on whiteness was featured in the 19th Annual No Dead Artists exhibition at the Jonathan Ferrera Gallery in New Orleans and reviewed in Art Focus Oklahoma. She has received numerous awards and honors including the John McNeese Grant for Socially Engaged Practice and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s Professional Artist Grant. kimrice.net LIZ ROTH received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been awarded numerous international residencies, national grants, and is an associate professor of art at Oklahoma State University. lizroth.com PARKER SEWARD is a painter, arts educator, and the gallery director at Oklahoma State University. He holds an MFA degree from Edinboro University and comes to Oklahoma via his hometown of Baltimore, MD. parkerseward.com BYRON SHEN holds an MFA degree in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and currently teaches art at Holland Hall’s Upper School. Shen is best known for painting “emotional landscapes” and believes in art’s ability to transform individuals and society to seek better ways of being. byronshen.net CECILIA VILLALOBOS is a visual artist from Skiatook, Oklahoma. After graduating from Rogers State University in 2014, she left Oklahoma to travel.

Strongly affected by her extended personal studies of art, history, and architecture in Paris and Barcelona, Cecilia is influenced by early 20th century European artists, such as French Impressionists and Cubists. She works to make the truest marks on her canvas to capture the energy of her subject with her own unique view. villaloboscm.com Born in Philadelphia, PA, GEORGE WILSON lives and maintains a studio in Oklahoma City, OK and has received a BA in art education with teaching certification (1979), and an MFA from University of Oklahoma (1982). Over the years he has worked with the sculptors Jesus Moroles, Melvin Edwards, and Ken Little. During his career he has won numerous awards for excellence in juried exhibitions both regionally and nationally.

JASON WILSON was born in McAlester, Oklahoma in 1965. In 1988, he completed his BFA in art education at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. He is currently the art teacher at Hartshorne Public Schools and has taught art for 27 years in Oklahoma. artbyjasonwilson.com

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EXHIBITION PARTNERS THE OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION (OVAC) works statewide to support visual artists and their power to enrich communities. A 28-year old nonprofit, OVAC produces publications, education, exhibitions and Oklahoma’s largest online gallery to connect audiences to art. ovac-ok.org THE ARTS & HUMANITIES COUNCIL OF TULSA is a nonprofit that seeks to cultivate a more creative Tulsa through advocacy, education, and innovative partnerships at the Hardesty Arts Center, Harwelden Mansion, and in the Tulsa area, which contribute to the quality of life and economic vitality in the greater community. ahhatulsa.org THE LUMINARY is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit founded in 2007 as a forum for artistic research, production, and presentation, conceived in response to both our immediate and international community, alongside our audiences, and in dialogue with artists. theluminaryarts.com OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION BOARD OF DIRECTORS

BRYON CHAMBERS - Oklahoma City BOB CURTIS - Oklahoma City GINA ELLIS - Oklahoma City, Treasurer HILLARY FARRELL - Oklahoma City JON FISHER - Oklahoma City TITI FITZSIMMONS, MD - Oklahoma City SUSAN GREEN - Tulsa, Vice President MICHAEL HÖFFNER - Oklahoma City, Secretary ARIANA BRANDES - Tulsa JOHN MARSHALL - Oklahoma City TRAVIS MASON - Oklahoma City LAURA MASSENAT - Oklahoma City RENÉE PORTER - Norman, President AMY ROCKETT-TODD - Tulsa DOUGLAS SOROCCO - Oklahoma City, Parliamentarian DANA TEMPLETON - Oklahoma City CHRIS WINLAND - Oklahoma City DEAN WYATT - Owasso

EXHIBITION SPONSORS

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation

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ISBN // 978-0-692-75064-3