All About art
Dan Lynh Pham: Việt kiều Cowgirl
Originally published on aslutzine.com
Vietnamese American artist, Dan Lynh Pham grew up against the white, mid-western backdrop of Tulsa, OK. Pham’s work explores identity, feminism, anti-Asian hate, and fetishization through powerful and elegant imagery.
Following her 2016 graduation from OSU where she received a BFA, Pham took a hiatus from art. Then, with time on her hands during the pandemic, she returned to creative expression. Pham made the first post on her art Instagram on May 31st, 2020. From there, her page blossomed into a public journal of private life.
“My artwork is kind of like a personal visual diary that moves between personal and external experiences,” Dan Pham explained. “On the personal side, I explore cultural identity and the economy of being raised in a really conservative Vietnamese household and at the same time participating in a predominately white American culture.”
In pieces like “Asian American Banana,” “IYKYK: The Struggles of Loving Your Eyes,” and “The Exotic Other,” Pham tackles such issues as assimilation, European beauty standards, and the exoticization and fetishization of Asian women.
Depictions of food serve as cultural codes in paintings like “Birthdays in America” and “Birthdays in Vietnam” where Banh Mi and Hamburgers symbolize her Vietnamese and American identities.
While her work explores the particularity of her experience, it also has an edge of relatability that has allowed her to connect with other Asian Americans through Instagram.
“I have created a small Asian community, that I only know by their usernames,” Pham said. “But at the same time, we talk about our experiences—and it’s crazy how similar everyone’s experiences are. Especially other Asian Americans who grew up around not a whole lot of Asian peers.”
Some of Pham’s newer works redefine traditional and stereotypical ideas of Asian femininity. “I’m wanting to change that narrative of the asian woman being looked at as docile and submissive and quiet,” Pham said. “I want that to be represented as loud, strong, and warrier-like.”
In our conversation, Pham explained that even history contradicts these stereotypes. Vietnam was once a matriarchy with strong female warriors leading the way. With images of girls and women lifting weights, or flexing, Pham turns the submissive and quiet stereotypes on their head.
Pham’s art does more than serve as a personal outlet and virtual community builder. It also turns the viewer's attention to the rise in Asian American hate crimes.
“I think the rise in Asian American hate crimes is probably why I’ve switched over to talking about Asian Americans,” Pham explained. “Asian hate crimes have gone up so high, but I feel like the traction of people just knowing that it is happening didn’t happen until this year. I just wanted to bring more light to it.”
In light of the recent horrific shootings in Atlanta, Pham continues to use her work to keep the conversation going and confront hate head on.
“In the past, when I voiced that I still experience racism to this day, I was met with surprise,” Pham articulated. “To give support to the AAPI communities means we need to recognize the racism and xenophobia that Asians experience. We need to recognize that the shooting in Atlanta, GA is a hate crime against Asian women and to start including the AAPI community in our talks about race and racism in America. We need to be seen more as humans and less as an exotic commodity.”
You can follow Dan Lynh Pham on Instagram to see more of her art. You can buy prints of her work at stillmill.store.
Erin Owen: Art As Environmental Education
Originally published on aslutzine.com
Born and raised in Nowata, OK (population approx. 3,698) environmental artist, Erin Owen grew up with an instinctual love of the outdoors.
“I was born in the country,” Owen recalled. “I was always outside. I was always taught, you know, those environmental perspectives of respecting the land.”
At the same time, Owen’s father worked in oil fields. The irony of her current position as an environmental artist isn't lost on her. But Owen makes this seeming contradiction in identity work to her advantage. She’s both humbled and driven by her roots.
“When I say I’m from a small town I mean my mom was the local banker and my dad was in the oil field,” Owen said. “I think that is how I got so stuck on an oil field and environmentalism and what I can do to fix it.”
This inborn awe and concern for the natural world has transferred to Owen’s creative work. Her paintings and sculptures are imbued with a deep admiration of and concern for the environment.
Unlike many kids who draw stick-figure families, when she was young, Owen depicted the environment around her.
“I would always find myself drawing landscapes or leaves or flowers. anything in the natural world before I would even try to draw people,” Owen said. “You won’t find any sketches of people in any of my sketchbooks, because that’s not just what I did.”
Now pursuing a degree in art and education at Oklahoma State University, Owen’s artistic practice is largely based in research, taking news of environmental degradation as inspiration. That research lays the groundwork for her pieces.
Her project, “The Bigger Picture” (pictured above) includes depictions of the various effects of climate change. Melting glaciers, bare fields, and dried up lands—each painting is accompanied by information on these three crises, making Owen’s art about education as much as aesthetics.
Recently, Owen’s focus has been sculpture, which has allowed her a new, more conceptual approach to environmental issues. Her works “Arsenic Drip” and “Faucet” were on display at a recent Art House Show in Tulsa. These two large-scale installations explore issues of water conservation and water pollution.
Both works were built from pipe cleaners and recycled plastic bags. Owen reported that she used approximately 5,000 bags for “Faucet” and around 6,000 for “Arsenic Drip.” The use of recycled materials plays back into her artistic praxis. Reused materials are part of the project— the vision of a waste-free, more environmentally-conscious world.
Even as her work discusses the tragedies wrought by climate change, Owen’s work never feels didactic. Rather, it is an informative viewing experience; her sculptures and paintings are pleasantly edifying and impressively designed.
“I don’t want to guilt trip [viewers] into caring about things they should care about,” Owen explained. “But I definitely want to be like, ‘Hey this is happening, and maybe you should think about this. And if you do, then keep digging and growing.’”
You can see more of Owen’s work by following her on Instagram @erinl.owen.art. Check out her website for more information about her past projects.
Riley Amanda: Transgressing Beauty
Originally published on aslutzine.com
At the start of our conversation, Riley Amanda misspoke saying breast-stroke when they meant to say brushstroke. This freudian slip was fitting, seeing as the Kansas City-based painter spends most of their time consumed by thoughts and images of the femme form as they explore the edges of sexuality, gender, and the complexities of existing within a body in a highly physical world.
“I just love the heaviness and the weight that bodies have,” Riley said. “And the work I have to put in to create that human weight and that depth, and how I can turn that around sometimes and dehumanize the body and really make it look like a painting.”
Riley’s fantastical bodily imaginings and inhuman ideas about human bodies are at the heart of their work. They paint their way through femininity and out of it, depicting bodies with elongated arms, huge hands, and distended bellies, expanding expectations of what the femme form can be.
“I think that femininity is just a feeling,” Riley remarked, adding that “female masculinity is even more important to (me) in some ways.”
Riley’s work pushes against gender norms, but it also pushes against realistic human form. In Riley’s paintings, bodies dwell in an ambiguous and androgynous realm with scrambled proportions and crooked angles.
Many of Riley’s works depict the nude femme form, a subject matter that throughout history has traditionally been in the hands and eyes of men. While male depictions of femme figures have often been unrealistic and dis-proportional in search of idealized beauty (think Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Bratz dolls), Riley’s mis-proportioned femme figures are unrealistic, but definietly not in search of beauty.
“I think a lot of my work is along the vein of realizing that the ‘grossness’ is okay,” Riley mused. “I do this in my poetry as well, where I relate stinky cheese to my body or roast beef to my vagina. I find comfort in being gross and allowing myself to depict grossness and not have it be ‘disgusting’”
At the same time, Riley invites other interpretations of their work.
“I’m not afraid of things being sexy...if my work inspires that reaction, then that's cool with me, it’s just not necessarily what I’m going for,” Riley said. “I’m not asking for attention to these bodies, but I guess I am too. It’s very much a yes and no, black and white and grey—it’s everything.”
Bringing an element of disgust to lust around the femme body allows Riley to transgress beauty and simultaneously offer new ways of seeing it. Through Riley’s skillful application of oil to canvas, nude bodies can resist and repel the male-gaze even as they inevitably invite it in.
“I recently told someone that I wanted to make art that a cis man would feel grossed out masterbating to, like he would feel sick about himself,” Riley explained in half-jest. “I feel like I objectify the body, but I don’t want to objectify the body in a way that is pleasing to the male view. And I don’t know how to go about that because anything I make about the nude female form is potentially catered to the male gaze.”
The near impossibility of escaping the male-gaze came up frequently in our conversation. But Riley doesn’t let that stop their work. They continue to make the work they want to, taking on the herculean task of both accepting and challenging male objectification as they go.
They turn their eye from models, to themself, to the canvas, employing self-portraiture as well as figure-drawing in their artistic practice.
“My physical form is never how I imagine it to be,” they said. “I got high one time with my friend and we both have really strange feelings towards our bodies and I drew down what I thought I looked like and it was super strange. My body looked like it was pregnant, and my arms went down to my ankles and my neck was super skinny and my chin was pointing out and my feet were huge and I was like, ‘This is how I see myself sometimes — this is what I tell myself I look like.’”
That struggle of truly seeing one’s body and the perspectives from which one's body is seen by others makes the human form as weighty as Riley described it. Bodies are weighed down by ideals and desires, made heavy by expectations and the fun house mirrors that line our lives. In Riley’s work there is something freeing about letting go of realism and leaning in to other, queer imaginings instead.
“I’m obsessed right now with imagining my ‘perfect body.’” Riley said, motioning to their features as they spoke. My perfect body right now: my face would be covered in perfectly smooth hairs like a microfiber blanket..and the hairs would be blonde and would catch the sun, but also my skin would be shiny periwinkle all over and it would glitter and I would just walk through crowds of people with my glimmering skin.”
Follow Riley on Instagram @rubluby to see some of their femme forms. Congratulate them on their recent graduation from Kansas City Art Institute by commissioning a piece!
Winking and Nodding: The Installations of Julie Alpert
Click here to get the article from artfocusoklahoma.
Tell Your Friends About Don’t Tell Dad
Originally published on aslutzine.com
In 2018, Charlotte Bumgarner, Margo Starr, and Dax Dyson were in their late teens—a few high school students with a passion for art and music in need of a place to perform and show their work.
It’s hard to get adults to take a group of 17-year-old artists seriously, so they decided to create their own space. Dax’s dad’s house proved the perfect gallery and thus ‘Don’t Tell Dad’ was born.
“But Dax’s dad knew,” Starr said. “We definitely told him.”
Their first event was small. The word ‘rag-tag’ came up a few times in my conversation with Bumgarner and Starr, and for good reason. The group—part art collective, part curatorial club—does much of their work on the fly with the support of many friends and at least one dad. It’s improvisational, spontaneous, and most definitely a communal activity. Though Dyson, Starr, and Bumgarner are the founders, they’re humble and quick to point to all the people who contribute.
Don’t Tell Dad’s inaugural event was very much for friends by friends, but a lot has changed since 2018. For one thing, time has passed, their audience has expanded, and they aren’t teenagers anymore. Their collective resume boasts two art events and a zine, published in collaboration with the Black artist collective, Black Moon Tulsa. Bumgarner is a musician in her own right, and Starr and Dax are both visual artists. Simply put: they aren’t kids anymore and it’s time to start taking them seriously.
Their upcoming event isn’t at someone’s dad’s house. No, this time Don’t Tell Dad is taking over a warehouse and showing installations for two consecutive nights. This project is more ambitious, but it is keeping with the accessible and communal values that they started with. They know what it’s like to be young and fighting for space in Tulsa’s galleries, and they want to help bolster everyone, regardless of experience.
The event will be a lot of artists’ first showing, Bumgarner explained.
“Anyone who messages us about showing their art, we say yes,” She said.
This is what makes Don’t Tell Dad so exciting. It isn’t just about the art itself, but about creating a culture of inclusivity, fun, and community. Starr and Bumgarner emphasized the importance of creating a free, safe space. They aren’t selling tickets, and they aren’t selling alcohol. It’s a family-friendly event crowd-funded by a GoFundMe page. In this way it’s still by friends, for friends; the friend group just got a whole lot bigger.
Check out Don’t Tell Dad’s upcoming event on August 12th and 13th at 7 pm at 65 N. Madison Ave. Bring your friends — bring your dad.
Exhibition Review of "Sunodos: Act of Attention"
Originally published in aslutzine.com
On August 3rd, in the middle of a week-long Oklahoma heat wave, I woke early to find my telephone beaming with a heat-advisory warning and a calendar reminder that I had an interview with Liz Blood, curator of Sunodos: Act of Attention.
The exhibition, which ran from early-June to August 12th, featured nine northeastern Oklahoma-based artists. Their subject: Oklahoma ecology. The exhibition was held in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship space. It was there that I met Blood for an exhibition walk-through.
Blood is a writer, and editor, who recently published Creative Field Guide to Northeastern Oklahoma, a compilation of art, creative writing, and prompts inspired by the region's natural environments. The Field Guide, like the exhibition, features works from various Oklahoma creatives and encourages its readers to direct their attention to the world around them.
Perhaps Blood’s background as a writer led me to approach the show with special attention to theme and narrative structure, reading the individual artworks like paragraphs in a larger essay. But like any good essay, as Blood explained, the exhibition doesn’t make the mistake of loudly proclaiming its point.
“When you’re writing an essay,” Blood explained, “you don’t want to be over the top where you’re just shoving your ideas down people’s throats. I think curation has the same thing. I’m concerned about the climate crisis, and I think about it all the time, but I don’t mention it in all the writing here (indicating her curatorial statement). My hope is people will see the show and think more about the local shared ecology and environment.”
Even without a neon-sign declaring global climate crisis, climate change is ever-present especially at a nature-themed exhibition like this. It’s always in the back of the viewer's mind, like the ambient sound of air conditioning battling the heat-wave that awaits us outside the gallery space.
Yet given the urgency of the situation, one might ask whether all eco-art produced in our era needs to be explicitly about climate change? Or is the climate crisis baked into our very (re)production of nature through oils, film, sculpture, and poetry in this era?
Though certainly the role of eco-art in commenting on ecological issues has shifted over the last few decades, I am hesitant to provide prescriptivist answers to any of these questions.
While climate change provides a silent background to the exhibition, the thematic foreground is about attention. “I think the overarching narrative is about the things we give attention to and the things we don't, by contrast,” Blood said.
The guiding text of the exhibition was posted on the front wall. In it, there is no reference to the anxiety-inducing news about the climate crisis. Instead, it directs our attention toward the intersection of place and stories: “As we are changed by the stories that happen in a place, so do we change a place by the stories we tell. Sunodos is the intersection of both.”
Sunodos, Blood explained, comes from the Greek hodos meaning road and sun- meaning together: “...Sunodos is a sum of those two parts, meaning ‘meeting,’ ‘assembly,’ or ‘way together.’”
This begs the questions: a way together through what, with what, and to what? We can see the exhibit as an answer to these questions. We might also find that in answering these questions, we are inevitably drawn back to questions of responsibilities to and engagement with our surrounding ecologies in the imminent climate crisis.
*
Shortly after meeting with Blood, I read an article in ArtReview provocatively titled, “Eco Exhibits Won’t Save Us” by Marv Recinto. Recinto begins, “Exhibitions of art about ecology have been sprouting up everywhere, usually operating under some premise of ‘raising awareness’ for the climate crisis.” He goes on to lament what he views as the ultimate futility of eco-art as it stands, divorced from climate action. He urges us to push art into the sphere of activism—away from the production of an art-object and toward an artistic-process of adapting to, preventing, and fighting climate change.
Recinto writes, “This proposed shift in art’s function from the production of speculative art objects to one of material praxis, particularly with regard to ecological art, inevitably dredges up the age-old question: what is art’s function?”
I would argue that Sunodos offers another function of eco-art—one less directly tied to climate activism, but still practicing a crucial form of material praxis: community building through regional specificity. Sunodos asks viewers to turn their attention not only to the art-objects but also to the local ecological community, both non-human and human. If art-objects won’t save us, the community can.
Sunodos’ regional focus emphasizes the local environment rather than the amorphous, abstract concept of nature. It highlights specific problems in the region rather than climate change as a global, undefeatable catastrophe.
This evades Recinto’s criticism (and offers a counterpoint); his article only features exhibitions in London and other metropolitan art capitals. In these places, the viewers may not be local, and the subject of climate change and nature then tends toward the conceptual and large-scale. The art he criticizes speaks about climate change as a worldwide tragedy (which it of course is), but in doing so, it fails to stir the audience to effect change on a local scale.
When I first met with Blood, I mentioned seeing exhibitions with an eco-focus popping up all over the place.
“But not in Oklahoma,” Blood countered. And she was right.
In this way, the exhibition also reflects and responds to a sentiment I hear often from artists in the ‘flyover states’—that these natural environments are less worthy of being conserved, preserved, or even observed.
Describing some Oklahoma landscapes, Blood commented, “A lot of people think it’s ugly, you know? I kind of wonder if that’s why we don’t have a lot of artists making work about our nature…growing up I had this idea that nature was elsewhere.” But by gathering art that turns attention to the local environment, viewers are given a new lens through which to appreciate their surrounding ecologies.
The specifics are everywhere in Sunodos. Take, for example, Darren Dirksen’s oil painting “Plight of Blue.” The subject is pokeweed, a native plant sometimes considered a ‘pest’ by farmers. Though in late summer it becomes poisonous, in other seasons it can be harvested for consumption. The berries are a food source for birds, which are key in seed dispersal.
“It’s so specific,” Blood commented as we looked at the painting's vibrant bluesky, against which the green leaves and dark purple berries are set, “but it’s connected to so many other things. When you know what it is, you’ll see it everywhere.”
This brings us to the subtitle of the exhibition, “Act of Attention.” Blood’s work, both through the Field Guide and the exhibition, asks us to turn attention to our surroundings, study them, and in doing so, build that connection — build a ‘way together.’
Attention guides the eye in the exhibition too. Take, for example, Rachel Rector’s photograph “All I Need,” printed on vinyl and covering one large wall of the gallery. It is a double exposure of the view of a tree’s canopy as seen from the ground and a photo of a window open, the curtains blowing in. The photograph also tunes us into our own attention: are we focused on the curtain, the tree, or a combination of both? The inside or the outside?
We can also see Nic Annette Miller’s performance of her American Sign Language poem titled The Land. The poem only lasts 22 seconds, and is composed of only 5 words, but every time it plays, new meaning arises. Miller’s performance highlights the effects of colonization on the land and people—one only needs to pay attention to the movements of her hands and her expressions, which generate the narrative tissue of the poem.
Aside from the art works, on display were a number of fossils found by Darren Dirksen, Sarah Thompson, and Bradley Dry at various points along the Arkansas River. A fossilized mastodon tooth and a fossilized leg of an ancient bison present another example of what we can find in our surroundings if we only pay attention.
In the works at Sunodos, nature becomes specific and thereby tangible and present. It becomes something in your backyard, on the shore of the river running through your town, in the turtle making its way down the sidewalk to the creek. The works in the exhibit may not provide a way out of the climate crisis, but I’m dubious that any single piece of art, any single exhibition, or single action of climate activism could. Nor do I believe that they need to.
What Sunodos does is contribute to the slow, vital, and tender work of community building as we find a ‘way together’ through our complicated relationships with each other and the ecologies we are planted in.
Molly Watta: Art in the Digital Age
Originally published on aslutzine.com
Self-taught painter and digital artist, Molly Watta deals in the heavy reality of being human in an era of rapidly advancing technology.
“It’s surreal to have seen the evolution in society with technology and the social network boom,” Watta mused. “It’s scary to know that this is only the beginning and there will be consequences and negatives that come along with our technology.”
Tech is a pervasive element in many of her paintings, if only in the form of a brief allusion to its ubiquity. An @ sign here, a keyboard there, and the occasional “www” draws the viewer’s eye. Watta’s art seems to reside in the no-where place one imagines might exist behind a screen—a sort of dreamy hyperplane where objects are stratified, pixelized, and made into both more and less than a sum of their parts.
One could say that Watta is bringing cubism to the 21st century. As Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques felt the anxiety of sudden change at the start of the 20th century, Watta explores the implications of hyper-acceleration in the digital age. But it would be an oversimplification to chalk Watta up to a modern-day cubist. Her work is forward looking; she creates art for an audience yet to come.
“The first forms of technology I was introduced to are now obsolete and years from now they will be myths and antiques,” Molly said. “I want viewers from the future to see pieces of classic tech in my work and say ‘what’s that?’”
In contrast to this futuristic thinking, Watta describes her style as “primitive,” but with complex concepts behind the simple technique and execution in her works. Instead of classic influences, Watta cites new artists like Virgil Abloh and Brian Donnelly (Kaws), creatives who have, in Watta’s words, “elevated their art style into a mega-brand that spills over into fashion and music.”
Whether you want to call it cubist, futuristic, or elevated, Watta’s art is certainly something to behold. But why wait till the future to see her imaginative work when you could check it out right now with your own digital device? Follow Molly Watta for updates on her work and art @_mollywatta and check out her website mollywatta.wixsite.com.
RICARDO SANCHEZ: BEKARTOE ON MORTALITY AND MORALITY
Originally published on aslutzine.com
Bekartoe (Ricardo Sanchez) wants you to know you’re going to die. But not to worry, he’s not coming to get you. He just wants to make you consider this inevitable endpoint, and he’ll do that by showing you his oil paintings.
“Whenever I think about death it makes me think about what the purpose of my life is,” Bekartoe mused. “In a way my art is just me thinking about death and mortality and working out what's important.”
When asked what is important, Bekartoe responded: “the answer is really going to be different for everybody.” For him, it's helping others, mutual aid, and dependable friendships.
Bekartoe is an artist who lives and works by these principles. Aside from screen printing and painting, he runs Bad Business, a van that redistributes lightly-used clothing to those who need it. This philanthropic project is carried out alongside his wife, Jessica Sanchez, who also does vocals in their band, IMGONNADIE, a name that pairs well with Bekartoe’s paintings. The band’s style, which Bekartoe described as freeform and expressive also reflects the form that figures—kneeling, dying, and falling—take in Bekartoe’s paintings.
Bekartoe got his pseudonym when the child of an artist he was sharing studio space with attempted to write "Ricardo" on one of his paintings. The misspelling seemed fitting, he said. "I was making these mortality pieces about death and stuff and a little kid is signing them."
Still, Bekartoe's work is definitely not kid's stuff. He earned his BFA in Painting and Screenprinting in 2014 from NSU in Tahlequah, OK.
“I just started painting after, basically breaking all the rules,” Bekartoe said. “They taught me all this stuff, and I thought ‘What if I don’t do it?’”
He has continued expanding his style in his personal artistic practice, his professional work as a screenprinter at Ambition Co. and with Jessica, for their business Skewed Press. At Ambition, Bekartoe’s prints for whoever walks in the door. However, when at Skewed Press, he’s more selective.
“As far as my client base goes it's more of a tight-knit group,” Bekartoe said.
Skewed Press has worked with Tulsa Noise and Cult Love Sound Tapes. His work as a screen printer often bleeds into his painting.
“Whenever I paint I kind of have a silk screen mentality in the back of my head,” Bekartoe said. “So I’m painting in a way that if I wanted to take a picture of it or scan it, I could run a silk screen print later on.”
“It's nice to have a means to help my friends create something and then help them support themselves by making this merch for them,” Bekartoe said of running Skewed Press. “I’m just trying to make art with my friends you know?”
Bekartoe’s earliest influence came from the paintings of Francis Bacon. Lately, he looks to local artists like Sacul Rensiw, Swan Shekinaa, Michol Moss, and the many artists who participate in the Cult House Mural Project for inspiration. Learning from fellow Tulsa artists, Bekartoe has taken to using spray paint for the big bold colors that make up the base of his oil paintings.
Bekartoe’s work has become more political since COVID-19 and this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. Along with his usual motifs of graves and figures crouched on their knees, Bekartoe has added bombs and televisions to signify the power of the media in shaping public opinion and the ways mankind’s abuse of the environment turns our violence right back on us.
“In this kind of era I think it's important,” Bekartoe said. “I think there is a possibility for change so I really want to portray some of those ideas out on canvas.”
You can find Bekartoe’s work on his website bekartoe.com or by following him on instagram @bekartoe
Gagan Moorthy: People/Place, Pictured
Originally published on aslutzine.com
Gagan Moorthy is the only person I’ve met who’s Instagram handle is just his first name, which somehow makes talking to him feel like talking to someone famous. This effect is only enhanced by his photography, the composition, color, and curation of which are pristine—enchanting even.
Moorthy’s photographs pull in the viewer, asking them to come closer, explore, and look beyond the canyons and faces they capture into the stories they can tell.
Gagan Moorthy is a photographer, yes, but where his real talents lie is in his ability to turn the static stills of a camera into dynamic narratives.
“Photography is important in terms of being able to just physically strike you, or give you something beyond words on paper or beyond just dialogue,” Moorthy said, and his work does just that.
As a visual storyteller, Moorthy employs multiple forms of media to compose in-depth explorations of people and place. One such project dove into the social fabric of Alva, OK.
Alva, home to Northwestern Oklahoma State University is a college town in the most real sense of the phrase: upon first looking at it, the college seems to be the only thing there. With a population of just under 5,000 and sitting in the mid-North of a state already viewed as the boondocks by many, Alva really does appear to be the middle-of-nowhere. But in Moorthy’s project “Somewhere,” he turns viewers' expectations on their heads.
“Somewhere” incorporates film, photography, and audio interviews to explore tradition, progress, change, and diversity in Alva. Best of all, the project doesn’t fall into the tropes that often accompany small-town coverage. In his project, Alva is a many-sided town, as complex and valuable as the people who live there. It’s smallness, in Moorthy’s project, is exactly what makes it so big.
Moorthy’s project on Alva hits close to home, since it is, afterall, his home. The child of immigrants, Moorthy’s mostly-white hometown shaped his understanding of otherness.
“They came to the US in the 90s,” Moorthy said of his parents. His dad received his Phd at OU and took the first job he could get, which happened to be in rural Oklahoma. “So that’s where I grew up,” Gagan said, “Our little family of four in this really white rural space...growing up, you realize how different you are. The feeling of otherness is very clear in a place like that.”
If the feeling of otherness was a sharp edge growing up, then access to wide open spaces was the softness that gave Moorthy escape. Aside from projects like “Somewhere,” “Noceur,” and “Soham,” each of which focus on people and the environments that built them or vice versa, Moorthy spends much of his time outside taking in what he can of the beauties the earth has to offer—at least before they’re gone.
The writer Susan Sontag described photographs as “memento mori,” writing that “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”
In an age of ever-changing environments, the role photographers play in capturing disappearing places is something Moorthy takes seriously, saying that part of his work is “reflecting (natural spaces’) beauty and even sometimes the loss of beauty in the sense of climate change or environmental challenge.”
But this urgency to freeze moments for future rememberings expands beyond the threat of climate change. It is present in all of his work.
“It’s almost like being able to control time in a way,” Moorthy said of photography. “You’re almost time bending... You can take a photo of something that’s only going to happen in a moment—like a sunset will only happen that way one time for the entirety of our time space continuum, so that is an interesting dynamic of being able to create visually.”
Coming up, Moorthy has some ambitious plans, namely, an ‘Earth Recital’ in which he hopes to bring in contemporary dancers into natural spaces, using elements of biomimicry to reflect a humanity in the landscape.
Until that project is complete, you can check out more of Moorthy’s work and buy some of his photographs as prints, puzzles, or postcards on his website gaganmoorthy.com.
Roach and Nia Danielle Lovemore Rutledge on Queer Friendship
Rochelly Elias (Roach) and Nia Danielle Lovemore Rutledge met in highschool in Lawrence, KS shortly after Nia moved there from Tulsa, OK. They were around 15 when they sat together at a lunch table, and Roach tried to make conversation by asking Nia what she thought of Alexa Chung.
“This was prime time of 2013 Tumblr,” Nia said.
What started as a little conversation sprouting from Tumblr discourse blossomed into a long and fruitful friendship.
“Knowing Rochelly has completely changed me as a person,” Nia said. “Had I not met her, I would not be the same person I am today.”
“I would not be making art,” Roach added.
The two Lawrence-based artists told the story of their meeting between bursts of laughter. Their narration appeared a happy symbiosis as they filled in what the other missed and smiled as they spoke.
“I think Rochelly and I were always undeniably weird and gay and liked art,” Nia said. “We didn’t even need to come out to each other. It was always a direct connection.”
The two exchanged drawings of pin-up girls and passed notes with Velvet Underground lyrics. Roach recalled how Nia encouraged her to use color in her work and hyped her up. Their content converged on one subject in particular.
“I’ve always loved drawing women’s bodies,” Roach said.
Nia too shared in this passion, once even getting into an argument with a high school art teacher about the nudity in her work.
“I never really realize how controversial nudity is until I show it to other people,” Nia said.
Now, many years since high school passed, the two are free to depict what they want how they want to.
Nia and Roach recently collaborated on a four-panel graphic story titled: “The Swampy Love Story between Fire Fairy & Mystery Mermaid.”
The artwork is as much a testament to their friendship as an exploration of eroticism and platonic love. It reads like a map of their artistic growth and an alter to queer representation.
And about Tumblr… that oft-forgot blogging platform did more than stoke the flames of their friendship, it was also a source of early influence for both Roach and Nia.
“Tumblr really influenced my art,” Nia said. “It really influenced the idea of curating a certain aesthetic.”
Nia described the different phases her blog went through from neon lights, to disposable cameras, and evolving into a depository of all things vintage lingerie, burlesque, and erotica. These last subjects are still present in Nia’s work which often takes nude female bodies as its subject matter.
In “The Swampy Love Story” a shapely, bare-bodied mermaid (a stand-in for Nia) reaches out to a sparsely-clad fairy (a stand-in for Roach). The fantasy swampland is replete with flowers, vines, and leaves as voluptuous as the female figures themselves.
Roach and Nia both stress the importance of producing the representation you want to see.
“There isn’t much representation of bigger women in drawing,” Roach said. “I’m just sick and tired of seeing the representation of skinny white women in drawings and art. Because I feel so distant from that. And also it's usually fine art — I just want to see cute cartoons, cute illustrations of diverse women with diverse bodies loving each other.”
The love is clear between the two when they speak and in the mythical reflection of the four panels where the two fantasy-figures call out to each other in a reciprocal siren call.
In their art, they look free, perhaps because the process of making the work was so freeing itself.
“I love making art because no one can take that away from me,” Nia said. “Even if I’m on an island by myself, I’ll be making sand dune drawings.”
You can see more of their work on Instagram @bodaciousdaydreams and @r0ach3lly. The two plan to make prints of the panels in the near future.
Where Art and Community Meet: Tulsa’s Queer Art Market
Originally published on aslutzine.com
The idea for a Queer Art Market first came to Kelsey Partin about a year ago. As Partin explained, it started off with a simple premise: “get everyone together so it’s not just a market, it’s a community.”
Partin, with the help of friend and fellow queer artist, Hannah Abert, turned thought into action. What started out as an inkling of an idea has manifested into a real community-based art event that will take place on October 16th in the parking lot behind Whittier Bar. The family-friendly event officially runs from 3-6 pm, though Partin and Abert encourage guests to continue the festivities at Whittier Bar after. The Queer Art Market will feature queer artists and makers peddling their goods, vegan baked items from The People’s Bakery, and a zine stand.
The Queer Art Market, as Abert and Partin emphasized, is “by the people, for the people.” With this ethos at its core, the market encourages artists to connect with one another and build community.
“Whenever artists come together, they can share resources and help each other do their own thing,” Abert said. “A lot of artists just don’t have space in the larger art community in Tulsa so we hope to create these little bubbles of art community where artists can get feedback on their stuff and hang out like-minded people.”
Partin and Abert both discussed the importance of communal conversations to the (often individualistic) artistic process. “Sometimes it’s nice to get out and talk to other artists,” Partin said. “It can help to see through other people’s eyes and make shit together and get positive feedback,” Partin said.
Queer artists themselves, Partin and Abert both understand the struggle of finding a platform to show their work. With the Queer Art Market, they hope to create a platform from the bottom-up.
“In Tulsa there are not a lot of opportunities unless you’re in with the arts foundations,” Abert said. “It’s hard for young queer artists to get opportunities. We just wanted to make a space for people to represent themselves and their art.”
Show your support by going the Queer Art Market on October 16th. Show your support to the artists, buy some art, and get some good vegan baked goods while you’re there!
Audrey Byrd: Solo Show
Originally published on aslutzine.com
On January 9th, Audrey Byrd will be hosting her first solo show at The Studio. Byrd, a fairly new player in the Tulsa Art Scene, is currently a medical student at OSU Tulsa. She realized her passion for painting at the start of quarantine.
“I was pretty much house bound,” Byrd recalls, “I needed something to remove myself from studying because I slept, ate, and studied all in the same place.”
She transformed her dining room into a makeshift studio and went to work. At first, she planned only to decorate her space and give paintings as gifts. But this amateur artist was soon offered money for her work, and, in Byrd’s words, “it really blossomed from there.”
Now, Byrd has sold hundreds of pieces, all while studying for her exams. And you can see why just by looking at her work. Bold, chunky strokes and bright colors define Byrd’s eccentric style. But her art is more than just a vibrant pop to add to a room, it has serious depth. Byrd, whose main medical interests lie in obstetrics, wants to bridge her lives in medicine and art. She is planning for her first show to be centered around kinder ways of looking at the human body.
“I think that it's never a bad time to talk about body positivity, sexuality, and consent and boundaries,” she said. “I want the show to be a way to help the women in my life and in my community to just feel more comfortable with expressing themselves.”
Catch the full artist profile that will be available in aslutzine in April. In the meantime, follow Audrey Byrd’s work @audreybyrdart and catch some of the donation-based art she does @art_for_advocacy.
Barrett Bryan: Cinematic Painting
Originally published on aslutzine.com
Painting bright, abstract works, Tulsa artist, Barrett Bryan has come into his own. His newest paintings set a stage, then fill it with anything from dark figures, to cars, fire, or a surreal living room where a hand protrudes from the ceiling and dangles a chandelier.
Bryan, who signs his works under the simple alias, “Bearly,” thinks of his work in stages.
“I was copying Keith Haring when I first started,” Bryan said, in a tone edged by partial self-deprecation. Bryan’s work developed from what he described as “abstract stuff that didn’t have any rhyme or reason,” into a kind of experimentation with color that crystallized into more figurative scenes like the ones he produces now.
“Just recently, I’ve been moving away from the bold colors to capture more darkness,” Bryan said of his current stage. “I’ve been toning the colors down more, and painting little images that pop into my head.”
Acrylic layers give his newest works depth. Base-layer shapes peak out as a carpet beneath darker walls of color. Strange settings gel and form into something less than familiar, as in his untitled painting (shown above) where the viewer is both drawn in and repulsed by the odd scene.
In his painting, “Noir,” bright purples and yellows contrast with a lone, dark-blue car sitting below a skyline of bare, impressionistic buildings and one giant green duck staring down on it all.
The surrealist scenes Bryan creates seem alive with disjointed stories. Looking at some of his most recent paintings is like following the plot of a mystery that goes static every few minutes, requiring the viewer to make sense of a bizarre narrative where the meaning has been fuzzed out.
This feeling perhaps comes from the fact that Bryan takes much inspiration from movies. Bryan—who makes and scores his own films when he isn’t painting—cites David Lynch as one of his favorite directors alongsideWong Kar-Wai, Ingmar Berman, and Robert Altman to name a few.
“I like movies that aren’t corporatized,” Bryan said. “When you can see the director has their hands down the throat of that project, that’s what I like.”
Bryan is exercising some of that meticulous, directorial control in his paintings, making this cinematic influence clear in his work. Even if the plot isn’t explicit and the characters’ features are vague, the viewer begins to guess at a story. What the viewer gleens is less of a concrete narrative and more of a mood, a tone, a loose impression.
In “Angel at the Door” the shadowy religiousness of the imagery is incongruous with the flying figure above an odd-shaped house. The angel is light, but there is something foreboding in the dark ocean it stands on.
“I’m always digging,” Bryan said of his process. “I’m always like ‘what’s the next thing.’ There is self reflection and self discovery, and hopefully now I’m at a point where it’s like ok, how can I self-reflect but also communicate to other people.”
Bryan is one to watch in the Tulsa art scene. Check out more of his work on Instagram @bearisok, and visit his website to purchase pieces. You can also view his short-films on his Youtube channel.
Revisionist Future: Envisioning Better
Originally published on aslutzine.com
The ahha exhibition “Revisionist Future” vividly imagines another future for Tulsa, one of beckoning promises that bank on a transformed present. Even as the paintings envision futurity, they point to the current moment.
Featured artists Antonio Andrews (of No Parking Studios) and Alexander Tamahn are two rising stars in the Tulsa art scene with very different styles.
Tamahn’s works like “Land We Own,” “Love Ourselves Harder,” “I Affirmed”, and “Bet on Black” exemplify his radiant optimism. His portraits convey a wide range of emotion in simple, but exacting, colorful strokes. From a toothy grin, to pursed lips, to searching eyes, these sparse works make use of the wood’s grain and texture. The brilliant subtlety of Tamahn’s work is complimented by the frantic layering in Andrew’s.
In Andrews’ paintings “eiu Tribal Territory” and “Community Garden,” each brush acts as a cartographer’s pen, mapping vibrant roads and rivers on canvas. Meanwhile, pieces like “OkNo1” and “First Name Verse” allude to Tulsa’s community arts scene. In the former, radio towers take up much of the upper right canvas, while DJ No Name stares out from the upper left—both in reference to Tulsa’s own pirate radio, OkNo1. The latter features rapper 1st Verse, his face popping out behind blocks of blue, orange, red, and yellow.
2021 is the centennial year of the Tulsa Race Massacre. While many events urge us to look back to face and interrogate Tulsa’s past, this exhibition instead looks at where we are and where we can go, finding a future imbued with possibility.
The exhibit opened at ahha Tulsa on March 5th and will stay up until April 24th 2021. You can purchase your tickets in advance at the ahha website.
You Do Not Know Me Film Premiere
You Do Not Know Me: A Spoken Word Film explores themes of police state violence and racial and gender stereotypes within the frame of Tulsa’s history. The film, directed by Myles Dement, premiered on Juneteenth of 2021.
Dement first saw poets Amri’ Littlejohn and Kelanni Edwards perform the spoken word poem at Booker T Washington in 2018. Three years from its original performance, the poem’s themes still hold, and Dement gives them new life through the camera’s lens.
“I don't think much has changed...since I saw it performed,” Dement said. “The change that we are seeking, unfortunately, has to take so much longer.”
I had the chance to speak with both Dement and Olive Blackmon, the film’s director of photography, about the piece. The two film students first met years back, at a film camp hosted by the University of Tulsa. Now, both study film in L.A. They came back together to make You Do Not Know Me when Dement posted a crew call on his social media. Blackmon was the first to answer.
Making a spoken word film posed a new challenge for the young filmmakers.
“The visuals are what we had to focus on the most,” Blackmon said. “With feature films or short films, it's more about what's not being said...With spoken word it's literally what's being said. So we had to figure out how to not make it too much visually...simple enough so that you can truly hear every single word because every single line, I'm telling you, is like a punch to the face.”
With simple visuals, the words of the poem shine. The majority of the film is in black and white, with red accents reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
The costuming too, designed by Lonnie McQuarters, is minimalist. Poets Littlejohn and Edwards wear white dresses and stand barefoot as they deliver the lines of the poem.
Dement had another key ingredient in mind.
“With this specific project, it's more about the content that's being said,” Dement said. “And also, secondarily, the historical significance of this setting.”
The majority of the film was set at the Historic Buford Colony Church. Littlejohn and Edwards perform standing symmetrically on the cement of the church porch.
Another segment of the film takes place on the stretch of highway where Terrence Crutcher was shot and killed by Officer Betty Jo Shelby in 2016. The echo of police violence still rings today and the words of Littlejohn and Edwards serve as poignant reminders that there is still work to be done.
“I'm hoping that this will just continue to push people to advocate for change locally, and...catalyze conversations,” Dement said. “I think that's the most that I can do because I don't have the biggest platform to just tell people ‘Hey do this,’ but I feel like we can all do our part individually on a grassroots level.”
You Do Not Know Me is available for streaming on vimeo. You can follow @youdonotknowme1921 on Instagram to see behind-the-scenes photos.
Hannah Abert: Inside/Out
Originally published on aslutzine.com
I first met Hannah Abert to exchange some mummified iguanas for a painting of hers. Abert is a collector. Oddities and side-of-the-road finds decorate her one-room apartment which doubles as an art studio. Her book cases are stuffed with poetry, philosophy, and psychology. Her floor is draped in a drop-cloth, and her cat, Charles, skirts around the canvases and broken mirrors that lean on walls and lay scattered across the floor.
A mixed-media artist with experience in painting, sculpture, and even a few experimentations with noise, Abert started as a photographer. She started taking photographs when she was younger and depression began to darkly color her world. Photography was a saving grace.
“I would carry my camera with me so that I would be more aware of things,” Abert said. “I would pay attention and be like ‘Oh that’s actually cool, I don’t hate being alive.’”
The camera was a way of seeing and shining light on the brighter things. In a way, the collecting Abert still practices seems a continuation of that early photography. The objects that litter her apartment are dear to her. She showed me owl pellets she’s been dissecting, dried butterflies, green plants, and even a full bird carcass which is frozen in her freezer among her groceries. These things bring her joy.
During the pandemic, Abert began scanning the objects in her apartment and incorporating the scans into her newer works. In this way, Abert is as much an archivist as she is an artist. She captures bits and pieces of life and files them away to look back on later and examine like a scientist would a specimen.
While photography and scanning offer a lens to focus on external surroundings, her artistic practice allows her to commune with her internal world.
“I think the connection between my external and internal world is making art and writing and scribbling and stuff,” Abert said. “That's the only way I know how to make a bridge and not get so in my head and only see projections of what's there.”
Creation has been a boat for Abert, carrying her through the choppy waters of self-perception and chaotic thoughts.
“If I don’t make things, then everything just gets stuck in my head,” Abert further explained. “[Making things] is a tangible way of working with my thoughts.”
Her thoughts stretch out both verbally and figuratively across her works. In some pieces, Abert starts with a blank canvas and paints words onto it, layering color and collaging items until the painting is multi-dimensional. The words are often illegible, drowned in brush strokes, just faint enough to be recognized as writing but not clear enough to pull any meaning from them.
When asked to describe her thoughts, Abert was surprisingly quick to answer.
“I think it's like a bunch of buzzing energy in there,” Abert explained. “Like if my head was full of bees and they were each making a different tone and that was the different thought — it's just a swarm of them and they are all buzzing around together and interacting together to make their hive and make the honey, but it's just chaos and it doesn’t start.”
Abert’s most recent work has been a series of zines made in the early and late pandemic. The newest zine consists of mixed-media self portraits, studies of self both internally and externally. Photographs of the artist are hidden behind scribbled thoughts, blotted paint, and in some cases, scans of objects in her apartment.
“I started making new paintings with self-portraits,” Abert said. “That was just a way to deal with this relationship of being with myself and just existing in my mind, but also existing in my space and to force myself to get comfortable with the fact that I’m a human being by making myself deal with it everyday.”
The many mirrors (broken or pieced together) in Abert’s apartment evidence this hard work of self-exploration, as do the many journals and sketchbooks on her shelves. A closet full of paintings both finished and half-finished point to the ongoing nature of Abert’s artistic practice.
“My work is just me diggin in the dirt,” Abert said. “Trying to figure out what's going on here.”
You can follow her on Instagram @hannahabert. Abert is set to show work with Madye Stombaugh at Shades of Brown in August.
Queer Oklahoma’s Past, Present, and Future: Center for Queer Prairie Studies
Originally published in Art Focus Magazine’s Fall 2022 edition. You can find the full article here https://www.ovac-ok.org/art-focus-ok-magazine
Come as you are: Allison Ward’s Happy Birthday at Positive Space
Originally published in Art Focus Magazine’s Spring 2023 edition. You can find the full article here.