Storm’s Comin’: Solo Works by Katherine Hair Eagle
Positive Space Tulsa
Through Saturday, August 29
Walking into Positive Space gallery to take in the opening of their newest exhibit, Katherine Hair Eagle’s Storm’s Comin’, I immediately trod on a clump of pink and yellow crepe that I suspect was part of a piece of art. Don’t get the wrong idea about how I felt about this show, though. The reason I trampled across the threshold like a single-minded buffalo was to get to the absolutely striking paintings on the gallery walls.
But my decimation was fitting, in a way, because the crepe seemed to be an extension of the exhibit’s anchor piece, Strike, a sculptural installation that embodies the plight of billions of birds who die every year in the United States by crashing into windows. Each papier-mâché bird, anchored to the ceiling by a delicate brass wire and on a collision course with the gallery’s front window, is modeled after a real species, from hummingbirds to scissortail flycatchers. The whole ceiling is draped with these neon beauties, gliding toward an unforgivingly hard surface.
That queasy feeling of looming doom unites all the show’s pieces. Storm’s Comin,’ per the artist statement, is “a collection of works made in response to this time that we are living through of rapidly degrading environmental changes.” Each of the acrylic paintings features animals against a sinister backdrop—storm clouds, lightning strikes, wildfires—in uneasy communion with these landscapes.
My first assumption was that these hares and wolves and prairie chickens were fleeing from the destruction, but after spending more time with the pieces, that interpretation feels incomplete. After all, where can they run when the whole world is under attack? These animals feel more like they’re flying, halfway between this world and another one we haven’t yet destroyed.
“I wasn’t expecting there to be so much color,” Eagle said during the show’s opening reception, gesturing toward her neon birds. But her understanding of color is the key to what makes these pieces so reflective of the way Oklahoma tethers together beauty and destruction.
What makes these paintings so magnetic isn’t the darkness of the clouds, but the lightness of the grass. Throughout the exhibit, the repeated image of the gathering storm reads as ominous because of the way its navys and grays contrast with the magenta of the sky, the lime green of the foliage, the palest purple of the light falling on the rocks. The energy of life is every bit as powerful here as the progression of ruin, giving Eagle’s work a thrilling, chilling tension.
“All the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow,” reads a postcard that’s been stuck to my fridge for years, a Tolstoy quote that continues to reveal new layers of meaning the more light and shadow I experience in myself and the world. This triumphant show embodies that contrast, the gorgeousness of the rapture just before we’re snuffed out. Eagle’s arresting work is both stunning and savvy in its activism, reminding us why our natural world is worth saving. And maybe you, like me, will learn to tread with care lest you destroy what’s most beautiful.
