Monument Valley
Living Arts of Tulsa
Through Jan. 20
As a solo viewer walking into Living Arts on a quiet weekday afternoon, I had a very different experience of Monument Valley, a new exhibit of installation art, than the people who were there for the bustling, interactive opening on First Friday. Standing alone inside the gallery’s cavernous halls (well, not quite alone: shout out to facilities manager Chris Henson for sticking around for me near closing time), I felt almost like another figure in the exhibit’s “valley,” surrounded by what curator Laura Ruiz describes as “site-transforming” art.
In the west gallery, installations by Scraps Designs, Mark Wittig, and Kristin Robert integrate viewer participation: hands-on building and unbuilding, with Jamie Pierson’s curiosity-sparking neighborhood/thoroughfare paintings for potential inspiration, or writing personal reflections on sticky notes that become part of the work. (Just a few days after the opening, there were a lot of sticky notes. As in Invisible Voices, it seems like Tulsans are hungry for art that allows them to share their experience.)
Across the central room, Sally C Garner’s hundreds of yards of crocheted VHS tape hang like intergalactic goo, surrounded by paintings by Jason Rafferty and, nearby, a stoneware sculpture by Huey Potter. In the east gallery, the scene becomes deliriously surreal, as Dreamspace Lab and VNICEWORLD go wild with spray paint and trippy augmented-reality projection mapping on everything from a giant cat head to Persian rugs to an actual car owned by an actual Tulsan. A witty, stirring piece of video art by Peter Hay plays behind an adjacent wall, and a soft sculpture by Cassidy Frye (also seen last year at Positive Space) spills across the floor near a bench covered in drawings of little creatures, plants, and comfort foods.
While the exhibit felt more like a collection of individually compelling pieces than a conceptually linked whole, everything pulled threads in my imagination that are now weaving together in new ways. A monument is typically something meant to last a while; for me, these works prompted more thought about shifting or reorientation than about permanence — about releasing established histories, reconsidering known forms.
For Garner, a textile artist whose Complexities of the Mind is one of Monument Valley’s standouts, that massive weave of VHS tape becomes something like a suspended thought, a nebula full of history and possibility, with a tattered, empty black chair almost camouflaged at its base. Subtly shimmering and casting strange shadows, its black tones suggesting weight while its airy loft says “lightness,” the installation led me to ask how what’s “recorded” plays back over time, even through a lifetime. What shape does memory make? Where’s the “you” in the story of you?
Depending on where you enter the Living Arts space, you’ll see the collaborations between Dreamspace Lab (a new initiative from lighting designer Logan Sours) and VNICEWORLD (an project of multimedia wunderkind VNICE) either first or last. I saw them last, and literally cackled with joy when I stepped into their zone. A few of these pieces have been part of recent local events — a Tulsa Global District festival, a modded meetup, the “Christmas is Canceled” show at Fassler Hall — and all of them are giving a very “Tulsa right now” energy: reflective surfaces, neon colors, mashups of grit and glitz, Y2K vibes.
My two favorites—Duality: Creativity & Norm and WeLuvCats—hang side by side, with dissolving, hyper-pixelated renderings of the artists projected in between. And in the works themselves? Cats, for sure (plus some dogs). A skull. Gold leaf thought bubbles. Brain parts. Single capital letters. Carpet patterns. Mind melds — both literal, in the morph of projected color and light across two heads, and metaphorical, in the way these artists with very different skill sets have found to play together.
Living Arts has been fostering installation art in Tulsa for decades; I can’t count the number of environments I’ve stepped into there through the years. It’s good to see first-time curators like Ruiz (an artist who also works at the gallery) pursue their own takes on this long-established contemporary art practice. Her knowledge and love of Tulsa’s ever-shifting creative community shines through this show. Give it a look, and if you see that car driving around town after Monument Valley closes, give it a honk. It’s existed in a lot of landscapes here since it was last on the street. In some of them, if you’ve come to this show, you might have been there too.
Next at Living Arts: Champagne & Chocolate Member Showcase, opening February 2
