Art 365 Exhibition Catalog - 2017

presented by

sponsored by

OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALITION 730 W Wilshire, Ste 104 Oklahoma City, OK 73116 ovac-ok.org 405.879.2400

COPYRIGHT © 2017 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

978-0-692-01933-7

DESIGN

Christie Owen, hivedesignteam.com

PHOTO CREDITS

The Artists, Justice Smithers

presents

JUNE 9 – AUGUST 11, 2017 MAINSITE CONTEMPORARY ART NORMAN, OK

OCTOBER 6 – NOVEMBER 19, 2017 HARDESTY ARTS CENTER TULSA, OK

CURATED BY DANA TURKOVIC

ESSAYS BY ROBERT BAILEY KYLE COHLMIA JAMES MCANALLY JAMES MCGIRK EMILY L. NEWMAN KIRSTEN OLDS DANA TURKOVIC

Art 365 audience viewing Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital, 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

INTRODUCTION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One curator, five projects, two venues. The basic stats give the appearance of simplicity, but fail to accurately capture the depth of impact of Art 365. The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition proudly offers this experience to working artists in Oklahoma triennially, providing a year of curatorial support with an esteemed national curator and $12,000 of funding for each project. The results are undeniable. Within this framework, artists have the time, space, and resources to pursue ambitious work that is so much more than isolated one-off projects—these are springboards with the potential to have long-term effects on the trajectory of their artistic practice. We, as the audience, get to come along for the ride with an exhibition in Oklahoma City and again in Tulsa, and the documentation bound in this catalog you now hold.

This year our guest curator Dana Turkovic, Curator of Exhibitions at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, mentored and guided her selection of artists: Narciso Argüelles, Pete Froslie, Andy Mattern, duo Amy McGirk and James McGirk, and Kelly Rogers. Each project is thoughtful, direct, and inspiring, while at the same time relevant and reflective of both the Oklahoma landscape and the contemporaneous human condition.

Of course, dynamic programming such as this wouldn’t be possible without our generous sponsors who believe in the power of art to move us and positively impact our lives. We extend a special thank you to local partners NBC Oklahoma and Norman Arts Council. We received significant programmatic support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. And nothing we do would be possible without Allied Arts, the Oklahoma Arts Council, Kirkpatrick Family Fund, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Further, without our dedicated partners, the artwork would not have a venue in which to be experienced. Thank you to Erinn Gavaghan and the team at MAINSITE in Norman, and to Holly Becker and her team at the Hardesty Arts Center in Tulsa, for all of their help in installation, promotion, and programming. We truly appreciate their excitement in this partnership.

In the following pages, OVAC’s Board of Directors and staff are pleased to present to you the catalog for this iteration of Art 365, which captures the work, the curator and artists’ processes, and reflective written responses. We hope you will be as moved and curious as we were while experiencing these projects.

— Krystle Brewer — Executive Director | Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition 6

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Art 365 audience viewing Narciso ArgĂźelles, Imaginary Spaces, 2016-2017, film.

CURATOR STATEMENT : Dana TurkoviC

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As an outside observer and guest curator looking at Oklahoma’s art production, I am struck by the way visual artists embed themselves in the cultural nodes available to them. Each project has produced a unique analysis of the artist’s process and Oklahoma, tying in the state’s landscape, both social and geographic, with its economy, history and cultural diversity.

By forming meaningful and productive collaborations with the community, other art practices like dance and music and even disciplines like science, a series of independent voices have formed in surprising and gratifying ways to create this iteration of Art 365.

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Amy and James McGirk, Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

Narciso Argüelles cross fertilizes the fields of art with dance and music in his film and related series of photographs for Imaginary Spaces. He imagines a settled space for minority populations in an American culture that is always ‘becoming’ much like the OKC American Indian Cultural Center in its perpetual on-again off-again construction that forms the backdrop of one segment of his three-part film.

Pete Froslie is a wildcatter “boffin” who adapts technology to produce sculptural objects

pointing to an intersection of art, science, and culture. He harnesses 1.21 gigawatts of artistic energy to satirize the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced capitalistic society. His installation Aesthetics of Capital consists of a process archive documenting and collecting of materials that will ultimately produce a single gold ring via the mining and refining of e-waste from local universities.

Andy Mattern

turns one necessity of the Oklahoma landscape known as a “Tornado Storm Shelter” into a massive camera obscura with his series of monumental pinhole camera prints titled Shelter. The function of survival structure in a state with an infamously hostile weather system becomes an eye into the aesthetic world. His subterranean exploration into Oklahoma’ s built environment documents a pitch black experience that is less a literal translation of this curious architecture, instead communicating the psychology of these often raw and damp spaces.

Amy & James McGirk’ s

collaboration Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value is a mobile studio space delivering Minimalist aesthetics to reach the masses by giving away hundreds and hundreds of paintings along with a carefully documented registry and essay chronicling the receivers. Their collaborative work blurs two types of exhibition languages, conflating modes of perception and consumption. The artistic alchemy is to have a direct relationship to the recipient of the free art, and is only the first part of an ongoing documentary of the receiver and the object where questions of value and provenance are addressed.

Kelly Rogers gathers narratives from her social work and imagery from personal and stock

photos to redeem into tapestry the troubles, broken lives and anxieties of a community in her epic canvas work, Tales of Whoa. Scroll forward, world without end, a series of simple figurative outlines portray the outlier personalities all around us, recording the little triumphs and tribulations of anonymous voices. Stitched with care, her work is a tribute to resilience and a metaphor for healing.

As a curator-at-large, the goal of a project like Art 365, for me, is to communicate the multiplicity of voices that make conceptual and physical connections to the idea of “place.” I am grateful to OVAC for this opportunity to visit Oklahoma and to really get to know these artists and their respective practices. As an individual it is easy to get buried in your own locale and community and Art 365 was a great way to access another cultural landscape and to work collaboratively with artists who are exploring their own geography in a manner of different ways.

— Dana Turkovic, Guest Curator, Art 365; Associate Curator, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis 11

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IMAGINARY SPACES

Film still from Imaginary Spaces. Image courtesy of the artist.

Imaginary Spaces explores the boundaries of art through collaborations with performing

artists. “Art interventions� are designed specifically to interact conceptually with existing

structures or situations. These performances are captured and presented as a short film

that is part documentary and part art film.

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Narciso Argüelles : ARTIST STATEMENT The first performance takes place at the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City.

Today the structure stands unfinished after several years of construction and delays. Performers include dancers from the Oklahoma City Ballet, Classical musicians from the University of Central Oklahoma, dancers Wanbli Tallchief and Brianna Howard, and Native American drummers and singers. These collaborators perform a cultural mash up using dance and music. This performance marks the first “art” to happen in this meaningful location.

The second intervention takes place at the Gray Owl Coffee shop in Norman with Emmy Award winner and Hip Hop artist Jabee Williams. Williams recites lyrics from one of his songs in a full coffee shop, evoking the beat poets of the 1950s. With words referring to the Black Lives Matter movement, this intervention is about being a person of color in the U.S. The third section takes place on the streets in the South Side of Oklahoma City, an area with one of the largest Latino populations in Oklahoma. The intervention takes place during the Dia de Los Niños (Day of the Children) celebration with a temporarily constructed cultural center providing community art and highlighting the need for a permanent structure. Immigrants are under attack in this society with the promise of walls and deportation; and this performance stands in opposition to those looming threats.

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All images: Installation and performances from Imaginary Spaces.

Narciso Argüelles : response by Kirsten Olds What does it mean to intervene in a space that doesn’t yet exist? In Narciso Argüelles’ film Imaginary Spaces, we follow the protagonists across cultural sites in Oklahoma, from a coffee shop hub of college life in Norman to a Dia de los Niños festival on OKC’s south side and the empty hall of the long stalled American Indian Cultural Center and Museum; the film invites us into these sites that may be physical in location but in terms of support and visibility for people of color, exist mainly in dreams and darkness. Light acts as a protagonist itself in the film, as it physically draws the central figures forward, a recurrent metaphor of progress.

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All images: Installation and performances from Imaginary Spaces.

Argüelles refers to his work as interventions, drawing on the social-political resonances of the term.

But there’s another aspect to intervening, which is to occur in between, and it is this internecine aspect that gives Argüelles’ art its charge. For the scenarios he has created show us cultures caught in invisible spaces, lacking support, visibility, and room to thrive in the larger public sphere. Argüelles’ film rebukes a center-periphery model of cultural inequality, and rather shows how imbricated Native Americans, Chicano/as, and African-Americans are within the landscape of Oklahoma. His elegant film structure, organized in three parts, testifies to how, as Okies and Americans of all stripes and traditions, our collective fortunes are inextricably intertwined. The film punctuates this idea of twinned fates with its arresting scenes of a singer wrapping us in the sounds of patriotism, a Spanish rendition of God Bless America.

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Jabee Williams performs as a part of Imaginary Spaces.

Narciso ArgĂźelles : response by Kirsten Olds

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That act of translation epitomizes the strategies of juxtaposition and contrast that structure the central tensions of the film. From Jabee Williams dropping spoken word lines like Beat poetry to a classical pas de deux marked to drum beats, Imaginary Spaces yokes various styles in a way that exposes the hypocrisy of claims for cultural purity as well as the whitestream’s co-optation of the traditions of peoples of color. Williams, as a modern-day truth-teller, lays bare the stakes of the project: I’m looking for a come up / cuz you know they tryin’ hold my people down. The film’s scenes brim with optimism, but the lyrics carry a darker cast—”they don’t wanna see us come up / and they only wanna see us in the ground.” Imaginary Spaces thus pictures the struggle and hope for the kept-down and made-invisible to claim their rights to expression and to their homeland.

During the Dia de los Niños celebration in OKC, Argüelles established the Centro Cultural de Oklahoma, offering art activities for the public in attendance. His seemingly anodyne intervention dramatized an unacknowledged rent in the fabric of the city’s cultural life: the lack of such a center to provide space and support for Latino/as and others in the community.

Through his actions at the festival and in the film, Argüelles brought the Centro into being— who will carry it forward?

As contemporary dancers, one of them Wanbli TallChief, great-niece of the ballerinas Maria and Marjorie TallChief, move to classical and Native American music at the still unfinished site of the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum, they create a space where differences not only co-exist, but produce harmonious, beautiful results. Like Argüelles’ Centro Cultural, the museum here acts as an imaginary space, to be realized in the future, which provides hope as well as a cautionary tale—of dreams too big, of the forces that hold the people down.

On opening night, Argüelles staged performances at MAINSITE against a backdrop of blackand-white posters—one declared, “You are on Native Land.” Dancers took to the gallery with a moving duet and fancy shawl dance, with one dancer passing the yellow mantle to the next in a transfer rich with symbolism. The choreography gave way to Jabee Williams’ spoken word piece, reminding us of Oklahoma’s history of activism in Clara Luper and what’s possible with dedicated acts of resistance. Argüelles’ film and interventions at MAINSITE rendered the gallery—and OVAC, as the sponsor of Art 365—visible as a supportive site for different populations. That, perhaps, is one of Imaginary Spaces’ greatest effects: to encourage us all to see the topography of Oklahoma’s various cultures and citizens and to offer a vehicle and community for the people and cultural practices that have long been pushed to obscurity in terms of visibility, funding, and access to power. So how do we translate Argüelles’ vision to praxis? With our own agitations, art, and action. Be part of the come up and bring heretofore imagined spaces to light.

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Narciso Argüelles : interview Dialing… Ringing…

Dana Turkovic: Hi Narciso – Its Dana, how are you?

Narciso Argüelles: Good.

DT: Starting from the beginning I was thinking about when I did the studio visit with you, and I am remembering that day so well, it was the last studio visit I had and then was headed to the airport and it was such a lovely experience. It was totally unexpected but looking back it made complete sense because it was the perfect way for me to understand your process and your interests. During our conversations, you mentioned this concept of “imaginary spaces”, can you talk a little bit about where that came from?

NA: Originally the proposal was called “Collaborations” because I wanted something generic but describing in very specific terms what it was. I wanted to collaborate with non-visual artists and to treat the performances like a canvas. Searching for a title, I was thinking about interventions in space and thinking we are “creating space” in each part of the film. The history of the Native American Museum is especially is important. I wanted to find a way to communicate that in the short film so that people would understand the significance of that location. They have been trying to build the museum for 10 years, apparently every time they get it rolling people block it, essentially funding was taken away. In thinking about this situation there is a nice metaphor there. People pay lip service to include indigenous people and people of color, but only to a certain point. This space exists and it doesn’t exist at the same time. The building is there, the façade is there, to the point where people drive by it and assume there is something inside.

DT: So it is empty promises?

NA: Yes. And when thinking about the other parts of the film and issues I was going to address, like with the rapper Jabee, I wanted to do a project with him and I wanted to hear him rap but recited like poetry.

I appealed to him, as a musician, and asked him what he thought of beat poetry in a coffee shop? And I wanted to make sure that Black Lives Matter got in there. I didn’t want to do a project where I didn’t address what was happening in the United States right now. So I thought that was important to do. And that is about here we are in the United States — where can we feel safe? Is it imaginary? Does this really exist? Are we trying to create it?

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Installation and performance from Imaginary Spaces.

Installation and performance from Imaginary Spaces.

DT: So it’s about transcendence.

Let’s talk about that a little bit. What you are doing with this three-part film is a hybrid practice that is crossdisciplinary, within those different disciplines highlighted you are combining styles and genres as well.

With the ballet dancer you have this unexpected pairing of the Native American music and then you have the pairing of Jabee with the beat poetry so there are meeting points of these disparate things. How or why those combinations?

Narciso Argüelles : interview

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NA: I have been wanting to work with the Oklahoma City Ballet for a long time and I wanted to produce imagery that was about bringing art to the people. Right before we had the studio visit I had met a couple of people who were Native American and they just happened to dance and I thought maybe I could ask them to do traditional Native American dance and European or western dance forms. So I thought in this case it is perfect to put these two things together, something indigenous mixed with something that originated in Europe in order to talk about the issues that are important to me which are colonialism and identity.

The word organic is perfect because sometimes when you make art you don’t know why something works but you just know it works.

DT: I guess that naturally leads me to my next question or even the next part of our conversation. What OVAC is doing with Art 365 is unique and generous. The time is especially important. It is necessary to develop these ideas, that seed from the proposal has to turn into something, and it is an opportunity to flesh out your practice and find the most productive collaborations. How has the experience of Art 365 changed your way of working?

NA: I think it has given me a resurgence or rebirth of some sort. I think maybe I was too comfortable. I have always had the thought that the idea comes first and then if I need to learn a new skill then I will have to learn it even if I have to get someone to help me with it. So that this is how this project has gone, I was happy to find people who really knew their stuff. Native American director Kyle Bell, did a short ten minute documentary titled Defending the Sacred: A Standing Rock Movie. In the introduction he said, “this is my first documentary and I am self-taught.”

That’s all he said. I feel like that, I can totally relate to him, I am learning this, why not just pick up a camera and start documenting and making things that will move people? I think I will continue with moving pictures. One of the things that I had to think about, and I revisit this every once in a while because my work tends to be political, is making something that’s not. I had a student ask me once: “do you think all of your work is political?” And the way I answered it was that I don’t necessarily see it as political but it becomes political because of who I am.

Example: why is this Mexican guy making a movie about this? I think it was Ang Lee who directed Sense and Sensibility and people would ask why an Asian guy is directing this film. Why not? Does all of this have to be identity politics? So those things I think about but I am just going to make stuff and have other people figure it out.

DT: Yes I think that’s fair. When we met during the studio visits I really responded to the ambition in the presentation. You could have just shown some images and talked about the idea of collaboration but instead it was there already, collaboration was already present. It told me that the project that you were proposing had some legs to it and I knew it had potential to develop into something bigger. The film is three parts so what is the third part going to look like?

NA: The idea for the final part goes along with the imaginary space idea, to create a temporary cultural center. Oklahoma doesn’t have a Latino cultural center. There are organizations that are trying to do something but in terms of a physical space it doesn’t exist. So I am going to install a tent in the Latino part of town with a sign that says cultural center and do a community based project during the Dia Los Ninos festival at the end of April. The United States has Mother’s Day and Mexico has Kid’s Day. They are going to close the street to do the festival and that is where I will install the temporary cultural center to shoot the last part of the film.

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NARCISO ARGüELLES : interview DT: Oh Cool!

NA: I will have several large canvases and I am going to invite the kids to paint with me. I also have a couple of low rider friends that agreed to bring their cars out. I want to film them somehow I don’t know exactly how yet, whether or not it is the literal and physical vehicle to start that section. There are a couple of low rider clubs here but they are not in the visual psyche as they are in Los Angeles but here it is out of the ordinary so I wanted to have that and it goes back to my early childhood when I moved to the United States, that culture was my idea of beauty. I really admired this visual culture so I think some kind of nod to that will be a part of the last section of the film.

to finish something, to get something done, to see the potential in what it could be, is that a good description?

NA: Yes totally. For a while, in my artist statement, I was putting the reasons that I make art in part as promoting the Chicano culture to get something done. My colleagues and collaborators are all involved in the Latino community and planning for the future so maybe this project will be the start of getting something permanent.

DT: Great, that’s awesome. I think that in your case specifically, to be meaningful you really needed to make new lasting meaningful partnerships with people in the community.

This has the potential for some really important things to happen as a result, large civic things.

That is exciting, what an amazing opportunity to work through some big ideas. That was all I had unless you wanted to add anything else?

NA: I think I am good.

DT: We can talk again if you want to.

DT: I was writing some notes as you were talking about imaginary spaces, empty promises and to some degree hope for a more settled space. Do you think that maybe there is an ulterior motive potentially for this film that maybe it will inspire the completion of the Native American Museum as well as maybe a new building for a Latino Cultural Center and/ or just a neutral space? I think that each part of the film can act as a catalyst to push people

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NA: Okay I will keep you posted.

DT: Let’s talk again soon. This was fun.

Have a good day.

NA: You too bye.

Installation and performance from Imaginary Spaces.

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Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017. Image courtesy of the artist.

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FROSLIE

AESTHETICS OF CAPITAL

PETE

Pete Froslie : ARTIST STATEMENT How best can we see capital? This project responds to this question aesthetically with the sensitivity to matter, form, and meaning that we bring to art. Visual artists are laborers who produce lenses through which we may perceive culture. I am attempting to see connections between meaning and capital. I am specifically examining spaces where minerals and gases enter commodity chains, while tracing aesthetic signs of the paths they follow—initiated by capitalist economies. Consequently, I have been exploring natural sciences including geology, chemistry, and ecology.

Capital is something with a history; and it hides that history behind a signified value. An iPhone does not directly reveal its relationship to coltan mining in the Congo. In negotiating the aesthetics of capital and tracing histories, I have focused on the extraction of rare metals from electronic waste.

Specifically, I am using chemical reactions to refine gold, silver, and palladium from computer parts.

All metals record a natural history of chemical catalysts that originated deep within the earth, and the same metals can also catalyze economic, social, and political relations. Therefore, the project posits what alchemy might look like in the twenty-first century.

This project is still in a nascent state. Ultimately, the current work focuses on the production of a ring. I consider this ring as slowly “growing� from a variety of rare minerals collected from sources ranging from computers from a business college, to toenails of politicians. The ring is developing in response to sites I visit while working on this ongoing project. The next iteration will involve time spent during an upcoming expedition to the North Pole and at a biological research residency in the Arctic Circle region of Finland. As the work is in constant flux, it is presented here as an archive of process. The final ring will be the material manifestation of various supply chains through which capitalism operates; in this form it will make manifest the extent to which capital mediates between human beings and the rest of nature.

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Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

PETE FROSLIE : response by Robert Bailey Pete Froslie’s recent work derives from an ongoing process of exploring matter and its transmutability in order to investigate critically the aesthetics of capital. In his studio, Froslie may resemble a twenty-first century alchemist more than he does an artist as he makes use of highly specialized tools and very particular chemicals to remove from discarded scraps of technology a number of precious metals — gold, silver, copper, tantalum — that he then puts to new uses in ongoing experiments that mix art with science and pseudo-science to reflect on the procedures by which capitalism generates and consolidates wealth. Foremost among these are extraction, growth, and circulation, each of which Froslie pursues in ways that reveal surprising things about our economy’s reliance on an aesthetic that, when and where it holds sway, organizes human societies and their fraught entanglements with nature to accord with its precepts: a perverse kind of beauty that corresponds to the separation, consolidation, and movement of what is declared to have value. Art, Froslie suggests by presenting the results of his research to date in this exhibition as an installation documenting his working process, can enable us to see and to understand these things about our economy and can also provide us with models that we might follow to pursue other ways of valuing the matter around us.

Currently, Froslie’s work is oriented by an effort to make a ring. Most of this ring’s particulars remain to be determined, but what will inevitably distinguish it from the work of a jeweler and make it a work of fine as opposed to applied art are the seemingly arcane but also altogether familiar procedures by which its component parts are coming into being: again, extraction, growth, and circulation, here taken as aspects of artistic process. The metals that are to form the ring’s hoop are being sourced largely from junked computer parts. This sort of waste often finds its way to deeply impoverished countries where low-paid workers salvage precious metals from it through potentially hazardous extraction procedures. Froslie, in his studio, does much the same, stripping away circuit boards to get at the tiny bits of precious metal contained on them. Such extraction — including refining procedures that extract more and more the thing desired, increasing its purity — removes something deemed valuable from something deemed valueless so as to separate what has worth from what does not and to come thereby to possess it. A classic technique of primitive accumulation, the capitalist method for appropriating wealth by dispossessing others of it, extraction is the initial point at which things enter into the economy, and Froslie, getting at the roots of his own material as an artist, makes of extraction a foundation for his efforts to produce his work.

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PETE FROSLIE : response by Robert Bailey In his studio, Froslie not only extracts metals from junk, but he also sets up chemical processes through which those metals may grow, increasing in size as they appropriate value from elsewhere. Growth is another key process of value creation that, in a capitalist economy, tends to concentrate wealth in places where wealth already concentrates by increasing productivity so as to increase profits. Economies are said to be healthy when they are growing, gobbling up more and more resources extracted either from nature or from laborers’ bodies and minds, but, as Froslie’s eccentric growths — made possible by submerging metal objects into electrically charged solutions already rich with dissolved metal particulate — suggest that growth may not always be a desirable phenomenon. As ring shapes, prototypes for the final ring, are immersed in this bath, they begin to attract jagged protrusions formed by these particulates precipitating out of the liquid. A functional object quickly becomes impractical, misshapen, brittle, and the source of toxic vapors. Growth, then, can be a nasty thing, and as the second of Froslie’s processes, he shows the extent to which accumulative procedures produce exquisite objects but potentially fragile ones with harmful effects or side effects.

Just as the vulgarity of extraction is laid bare in Froslie’s work in all of its raw danger, so too is the deleterious side of growth.

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Finally, there is the matter of circulation. The processes through which Froslie grows metals onto one another rely on the ability of electricity to circulate through materials that conduct it, and, indeed, the process of value moving from place to place itself produces value. Indeed, value creation requires this kind of movement; stagnant value loses value, and it is not surprising that ours is an economy reliant on funds changing places, communication buzzing through networks, and electricity circulating in constant movement. Along these lines, Froslie sources his precious metals in commodities that lack markets, which is to say in obsolete technology that has fallen into stasis, its decay eventually becoming fertile. Through extractive processes that, combined with processes of growth, transform that decayed technology into art and will ultimately transform it into the luxury commodity that is a ring, he restores the capacity of those metals to circulate, a process in which they again come to hold value that, through continued circulation, will continue to grow and grow, extracting more and more wealth from more and more things as it continues to move. Movement, alongside extraction and growth, is made to show its hidden aspects as a facilitator of the damage that material manipulations occasion. Altogether, this process of extracting, growing, and circulating is how Froslie is working, mimicking the procedures of capitalism, but drawing out in so doing what they tend to conceal and, at the same time, putting them to ends other than profit.

A ring, the end of this process, is a sign of wealth and power. It is often a valuable prize, the object of a quest, or a token of bondage. It has material value because it tends to be made of valuable materials, but it also has symbolic value because of the immense social importance compressed into its small form. It is, in this sense, a cypher for capital. Froslie’s ring is no exception. By pulling from the refuse of capitalist production and the distributive chains that put consumables before consumers, he partakes of the system’s cyclical order — rings, too are circles, invoking continuity, return, and permanence — and he condenses, in the symbolically overloaded form of the ring, an argument about how that mode of production squeezes highly concentrated value into the tiniest of spaces, leaving the rest of the world value deprived and questing after it. His ring is the metaphorical image of this vast procedure’s consequence. That the procedure itself has, as Froslie’s ring shows, aesthetic foundations may come as a surprise. The idea that capitalism, a mode of production structured by the private ownership of capital, marketplaces, and, increasingly, finance, has an underlying and structuring aesthetics is not immediately evident.

Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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PETE FROSLIE : response by Robert Bailey We tend, of course, to think of capitalism in economic terms and to talk about such things as wages, supply, demand, prices, and so forth when we speak of it.

Froslie’s work, however, carefully unpacks the latent sense, operative within all of the production, distribution, and consumption that sustains capitalism, that a feeling of right order prevails (or fails to prevail), and that it is not so different from the ways that we tend to understand the beautiful: as that which accords to principles ensuring harmonious arrangements of parts into wholes by which we expect organizations of matter to adhere formally.

The aesthetics of capital take shape through the systematic dynamism of its operations, which means that, like an artwork or a flower, capitalism is composed in ways that can feel right or wrong to our sensibilities. It has shapes, textures, lines, color, and a composition that can be balanced or not. And capitalism is “right� to the extent that its numerous flows, each operating with a certain degree of independence and autonomy, each powered by relatively disorganized workers, remove wealth, in both its material and symbolic guises, from wherever it can be found and centralize it in highly concentrated places. The beauty of capitalism is its capacity to transform the unruliness of the material world into tidy (and large) sums. That is, capitalism is beautiful when its processes of extraction, growth, and circulation are aligned in profitable ways that funnel surplus value to capitalists, often by depositing it in luxury commodities like rings or artworks that have little functional utility but high symbolic resonance and therefore confer power to their owners and instill desire in those who are not their owners, desire that results in further extraction, growth, and circulation.

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As a ring made of gold derived from scrapped computers further shows, the aesthetics of capital are synced to alchemical procedures that derive wealth from base matter that is refined and refined into increasingly profitable commodities. Capital is gold made from lead. The alchemist’s workshop, a messy space of disorganized labor that generates the philosopher’s stone, the goal of the quest so to speak, is the capitalist arena par excellence, for it is there that the obfuscating and obfuscated disorder of the world is consolidated into things that locate value in forms that can be possessed, accumulated, and exchanged. The labor force is a gigantic alchemist in an enormous study, running to and fro from gadget to gadget, always thwarted in its effort to produce gold, not because it fails but because the moment it succeeds, its bosses appropriate its success, so it has to start over again. The process is pseudoscientific; it resembles modern science but it harbors a deep mysticism at its core that is incompatible with the modern protocols of scientific experimentation, which, again and again, repudiates the devastation that our economy wreaks by pointing to its harmful social and ecological effects. Froslie makes this plain by aping the alchemist, though in a thoroughly disillusioned and scientifically literate way that sees through the beauty of the system and bends the circuitry of machines to extract, grow, and circulate toward other ends, which means, among other things, that Froslie keeps his gold for himself.

Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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Pete Froslie : interview Dialing‌ Ringing‌ Pete Froslie: Hello.

Dana Turkovic: Hello. So how is it going in the studio?

PF: Its going good actually, I am in a really positive space. Recently I feel like that maybe all of the insanity in the last year is coming together. I’m in a good mood.

DT: I wanted to just begin by telling you that my conversation with you over the phone was a real inspiration for how I wanted the text to be understood. I think that what was how honestly it reflected the process by which this project has come together. Basically, how curators and artists talk to each other. How things develop over time and how things in terms of the work that you are wanting to make and the project that you had proposed, evolves.

DT: I want people to know that this exhibition, as it is experienced, even if the artists consider this a finalized work, it really is just a moment in time in your practice. And it is a reflection of where you are at and even ideas that you still might be working out. The piece itself might be a phase of something bigger. I think as I have been talking to everyone, I am really getting a sense of that too. I want to try and hit that home and one way to do that is to have this conversation, then it seems not so final and not so critical.

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PF: That makes sense to me. That has had a serious impact on me. Just our conversation about considering that this is a process at all times. I like to think that way when I am working, but then there is this clutch around the edge of exhibitions. I don’t mean that within a month, but throughout the year, just formalizing something that could be exhibited, or if it is a conclusion of this one thought. I really truly changed the way I am working.

This is more consciously a conversation that I will carry forward for some time. This is pretty healthy for me.

thought of, or you changed your mind about something because you had this year to think through it. Do you want to talk about that, as it relates to what you are doing?

PF: Sure. I think that it speaks directly to the curator/artist process. I have already been able to integrate a more conversational tone, even beyond this project. Much of my applications have been much more conversational in explaining where my process is and how it is shifting here and there.

DT: So you are still tied to Aesthetics of Capital?

DT: I have to admit that I only understood about half of the vocabulary you were using.

I even said to Holly at OVAC, I am going to have to look that up, I don’t know what he is talking about? I know nothing about geology, or a specific mineral you had mentioned, half of this stuff I am going to have to do some research on!

PF: Yes absolutely.

PF: I will take that as good.

PF: Although the project is really stripped down to that 20% or even 5%, but the question that I started with, asking whether or not we can see capital, that is right at the center, always. So definitely more conversational approaches to answering that question. I have been thinking a lot freer this year than in the past, a lot less regimented. I managed to free myself a bit more just keeping that question at the center.

Now I have landed in that space where I am incredibly enthusiastic at the moment. Now I am specifically engaging more of the natural sciences as a visual artist, like geology, chemistry and ecology are still floating there and I have found that changing my way of working is really surprising.

DT: This is an organic process and this work may only have 20% of your original idea in there. It changes over time via conversation and posing questions, maybe you hadn’t

DT: Do you want to talk about the work itself?

I know you are working on a couple of things for the show that relate to a bigger piece that will take some time to complete?

PF: I probably didn’t either!

DT: The only way I was going to decipher a conversation with you, is to record it! I have to listen to it again to then be able to comprehend, mine and grab what I need from the conversation. I really did want to tell you that was an inspiration for me.

Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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PF: Yes, I would like to talk about the ring. The last time that we talked, I got really excited. I have been focused in on making a ring. What that has turned into is essentially for the exhibition is displaying a process archive. Something that will show all of the things I have been doing in the studio that lead to the creation of the ring. Specifically, I started collecting e-waste, computer parts and electronics around the state where I could get things. I had access to computer systems from the university, our business college, computers that are being thrown out. So I have been collecting waste and mining and refining. I am really getting into this process of refining precious metals out of these electronics. In the past. So I have been putting these electronics through an acid bath that dissolves all of the metal from the electronics, and then through other chemical processes it will precipitate the gold back from the liquid, clay-like that melts down to a 99% pure gold so somehow these electronics and the waste, this stuff is a step removed from spaces where information is flowing and capital is flowing, and then a step removed but connected to the community around me where I am reclaiming these metals and calling attention to an aspect of this natural history that is inherently based in the metal. Basically all metals record a natural history as chemical catalysts which started in the earth and what I have found from the beginning of this project, is that it is possible to see capital when you consider the value of capital, that these same metals can be seen as forces that catalyze economic, social or political relations.

PF: That is where I have landed in this project, developing a relationship with metals. I imagine that the ring may take five or more years to finish, but I have really concentrated my focus onto the ring and I have landed in this space around metals which has also developed into a distinct fascination with the alchemical process and has opened up my research into alchemy in general which I am enthusiastic about.

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DT: So it kind of goes back to the Elon Musk bust that you want to do?

PF: Well you let me go off the rails. While paying attention to value and capital and meaning, artists are producers of cultural meaning and that is inscribed in the work, I was thinking that those objects I was making were being made specifically for the gallery that they need to have a wow factor, but I felt like that wasn’t where I wanted my work to go right now, based on our conversations and how my year has been going.

DT: You are protecting your skin right? You hear about people that go through landfills and dumpsters looking for computer parts, for recycling money.

PF: Yes I have been reading a lot about this, going on forums and having conversations online with hobbyists groups that are fascinated with gold refining exactly those people that you are talking about and also reading about Ghana and locations where massive piles of this waste have been accumulating and are being refined on a really large scale. So what is fascinating, especially with the gold and silver palladium which are rare metals, there is so much labor and complication that goes into it and the chemicals and making the extractions, tied into the value of the gold, partly that is why the alchemy has clicked with me during this process, it has so much to do with, in a philosophical way, of having to come to terms with our conscious, and understanding our conscious space that we can’t quite get at matter, although I don’t want this to sound too new-agey! Anyway I have become really excited about this.

DT: Let’s talk about this idea of value, one thing that I want to mention is how valuable this experience is. The fact that OVAC provides such a project like Art 365, do you want to talk about the value of that?

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PF: Yes absolutely. The one thing that this project has done is of course the money that I have invested in equipment that I wouldn’t have been inclined to purchase, so being able to invest money into my studio has been huge for me. Ultimately, though during the course of the year I managed to really change the way that I have been working in my studio sincerely. I have been trudging along from Nevada, Boston to Oklahoma in a particular way, carrying the weight of the fascination with new media in the 90’s, carrying this aspect of new media with me, that I didn’t realize until this year and OVAC and they are responsible for this shift.

DT: Lastly, I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention that this project is for you in some ways about what happens after this exhibition.

I just want to pose this question, what happens next?

PF: So, the plan was at the beginning of the year to go to the Arctic but for various reasons I wasn’t able to go. What it has done is flip the project around for me. I thought I would go to the Arctic and it would generate all of these ideas that would apply to this project and I would talk about what I had learned and I could talk about locations and sites create meaning. It has flipped. Now it is genuinely seeded in this research agenda and at the most basic level, this process archive for the ring. I will continue to grow this ring. Each trip will include what I have learned in a more conversational tone about location. I am going to Norway at Svalbard. I am going to end up in Finland for another residency, funded by the Finnish Society of Bio Art, it has an attachment to the University of Helsinki, doing research into snow algae, decomposed organic material in arctic lakes and ponds, so with my study of aesthetics of capital and finding those traces I am going to go up and learn about the biology practice and meet more people.

DT: Great. Keep me posted on that! Anything else you would like to add? I feel good about what we have talked about so far.

PF: Yeah, I feel good there.

Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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Pete Froslie : interview 45

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Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

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Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

Andy Mattern : ARTIST STATEMENT Shelter is a project to visualize time spent underground in Oklahoma storm cellars.

These cool, dim spaces are both havens and tombs, meant to guard against extreme weather, and yet they engender a palpable sense of vulnerability and fear. To capture this duality, the cellar, which itself contains the basic components of a camera—a dark chamber with an opening—is fitted with a dark cloth for a shutter. Then, using only the available light that filters in through the air vent, a sheet of light sensitive paper is pressed up against the opening to produce an exposure. The result is a collection of similar compositions, white and grey circular forms situated in black rectangles. While they appear abstract and call to mind imagery of celestial bodies, the photographs are literal one-to-one records of the ambient light inside each cellar.

Operating between representation and abstraction, this project is both a document and an impression of place. This region in lower Tornado Alley requires architecture of protection, which residents share in moments of need. Embedded in this routine but unsettling experience is a sense of connectedness and hope.

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ANDY MATTERN : response by Emily L. Newman I may live in Texas now, but I’m an Oklahoman at heart. To know me is to understand my relationship to this great state. Growing up, I spent years waiting to leave, but as an adult, I look back on my time there with fondness and nostalgia.

Oklahoma City has blossomed since I left, and I look forward to my frequent visits. Importantly, being an Oklahoman shaped me: thank you notes are mandatory, country music is a way of being, dirt should be red, chicken fried steak with white gravy is a lifestyle, and I will never underestimate tornados.

In elementary school, we practiced tornado drills where we would evacuate the classrooms and move into the hallway. We had to find a place next to a wall, curl up in a little ball, and place our foreheads on the floor. I would get so tight and furiously push my head into the ground, I almost always developed a headache. But tornadoes to a 7-year old are an abstract concept, one that I heard stories about but never understood.

Certainly, movies helped; Twister (1996) provided stunning visuals about the power of tornados, as well as cameos by celebrity weatherman Gary England and my high school English teacher.

Yet, tornadoes did not feel personal to me until

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May 3, 1999. My sister and I were at swim practice at Oklahoma City Community College, on the cusp of Moore, when the lifeguards pulled us out of the pool. They told us if we lived North, we should get in our cars immediately and go home, but otherwise they were starting to find people places to shelter. Hopping in my 1991 Honda Civic, we drove home in our bathing suits.

My family was lucky, in that we escaped the tornado unscathed, whereas thousands of others were hurt, suffered huge property damages, and 36 people died. This was the event that taught me about tornadoes, instilled in me a sense of awe and fear about their potential. Ever since and even though I left the heart of tornado alley years ago, tornadoes and their accompanying threatening storms have seemed to follow me. In my freshman year of college in Minnesota, a tornado destroyed a nearby farm and blew out windows in our student union. In graduate school in New York, a unusual and unexpected tornado struck Brooklyn not far from my then home in Queens. Even a few years ago, in the first year of my teaching in Texas, a tornado blew through a nearby town, trapping me again in a school hallway as I bonded with my new colleagues.

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Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

ANDY MATTERN : response by Emily L. Newman All of this is to say, tornadoes have shaped my understanding of the world. These natural disasters can sometimes be planned for, but can also develop suddenly and catastrophically. They can turn a sky green and rain devastation on a community. For many Oklahomans, as well as those living in tornado alley, tornadoes are a common enough occurrence that we grow accustomed to living with them and alter our lives accordingly. So unsurprisingly, looking at Shelter by Andy Mattern, brings up a series of associations with the environment.

Using light sensitive paper, Mattern transforms a storm shelter into a large camera obscura. Used since renaissance times, these devices allow light to be reflected through a small hole or space to reproduce an image—the basic principle underlying cameras and photography itself. Pressing the paper against the air vent, Mattern uses the main light source of these spaces to create halos of light against dark black backgrounds.

Appearing haphazardly hung, these pieces dot the wall of Norman’s MAINSITE Contemporary Art, surrounding a recreation of an air vent of a tornado or storm shelter. Mattern smartly allows you to see the connection between the process of creating these artworks and the end result.

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Significantly, the paper is glossy and when I got up close to them I saw a slight reflection of myself on the surface. Suddenly, I’m transported into the shelter looking up at the faint light.

The light is comforting and revealing, reminding the viewer of the world beyond the confined space. Yet, the haven can also be alarming, the light potentially representing the clearing of the storm yet the dangers of what is to come and be revealed. Shelters, then, can simultaneously make you feel both safe from the elements, and yet afraid of the possibilities. Furthermore, they function as visible reminders of the turbulent weather that happens in this part of the world, while also standing in as signs of privilege and class, that someone can afford the extra form of protection only if available, affordable, and accessible to people.

Like many, I’ve never had a shelter, but I’ve also wondered about one. Instead, I have always made plans devised for everywhere I’ve lived: the safest room, the weather radio with the hand crank, the little backpack for my dog Fred to keep him close to me. Many of my friends dismiss storms or run outside to watch them, while you will find me hunkered down and glued to the television updates. My light at the end of the tunnel is always when the regular programming starts airing again, then I know it’s safe to breathe easy.

Upon first glance, Mattern’s works are abstract black and white pieces that artistically recall Kasmir Malevich and early twentieth century painting. Beacons of light though, these works are reminiscent of my light at the end of the tunnel. While appearing straightforward and simple, these works are loaded with various associations. Upon closer inspection coupled with better understanding of the context, Shelter allows for a deeper and richer meaning. To me, these artworks represent a facet of Oklahoma life, one that I see as ultimately tied to my own identity.

Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

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Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

Andy Mattern : interview Dialing… Ringing…

Dana Turkovic: Hi, how are you?

Andy Mattern: Okay how are you doing?

DT: We are finally getting a chance to talk!

AM: Yes a lot of technologies and pixels have come together to make this possible.

DT: How is it going?

AM: It’s great, I am sitting here in the studio.

DT: I wanted to begin by mentioning that a lot of the experience of Art 365 for me has really been a process by which we develop this over time. I just didn’t want to over think something, it’s better to just talk.

AM: Sure. I am happy for that to be the case and I can identify with what you are saying even in my writing I try to pair things down.

DT: So your project has been modified and altered slightly over this time but you really maintained the integrity of your original proposal. But through some trial, error and experimentation that the project has changed a little bit. Can you talk about how you have had to refocus how the piece has been organized?

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Andy Mattern : interview AM: Yes, that’s actually been one of the big learning curves for me going through this process, in the proposal and making some of the work and talking with you and then continuing to make the work. When I went out and tested the content of what I had proposed I felt that the result deviated from the experience I was having. I really wanted the work to be about the experience which was crawling into these dark spaces and considering them as a specific form of architecture. It was a product of our conversation at MAINSITE that day where I was flipping through those cell phone images that I had taken while I was working and you saw the picture of the red rectangle with the black tape that I used to cover up the vents in the storm shelters and pointed that composition out. That moment gave me the realization that there is this light source pouring into these dark chambers which is the basic definition of any camera.

The original idea was to convert them into a camera so what I realized is that I didn’t have to do what I said I was going to do in order to get the spaces to perform the function that I wanted them to perform. It was a simplification and solidification of the original idea.

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DT: Yes. When I was reading the proposal I could see what you were thinking of doing without the images, and that is why the writing is so important. I could see that there is a continuity in your practice there was a real desire to understand the new landscape you were living in and I liked that you were interested in surveying that landscape but that you were using the architecture of something that was unfamiliar to you.

AM: And me too. And this is something that I was thinking about as I moved to Oklahoma in thinking about what I wanted to pursue. One of the things I learned in graduate school is that the ideas present themselves rather than me pulling them out of thin air. It has only ever been a progressive effect of falling on my nose or wandering around and just being in the world. These storm shelters presented themselves in a similar way just by walking around in the neighborhoods and being an unfamiliar form, just being a hump in the yard with a little chimney coming out of it.

That was enough of a flashing light in the landscape for me to go and inspect it and want to learn more.

DT: I think it really ties into the statement you made to describe your practice as, “limits of human control over technology in the built environment.” It was almost like the storm shelter was built in order for you to do this project. This literally is an illustration of that idea.

AM: Yes that is one of the things that I love about it as well. That I continuously find myself drawn to certain forms or certain by-products or processes or activities and I see them in that metaphorical way. There are limits to our control because they are happening without our volition but also because of us.

These spaces have a function that is at the edge of our safety and at the edge of our orchestration. They are extremely utilitarian and stripped down, terrifying spaces. I have been in so many now, they are never cozy and never warm and yet their job is to keep you alive. They have this duality and I am really interested in that.

DT: Right. I was just thinking of that idea of duality because it is an invisible architecture and it is operating in this space between the visible and invisible and what I like about it is instead of producing this image of the landscape it is producing this abstract color form, a pure light source and it has inverted so many things. Do you want to talk about the imagery?

AM: Yes. I am also really interested in that version and flipping that you are talking about where it is a space that is a camera and the image of just the light and it is an image that is made with just the space. There is this reciprocal yet unfamiliar way of making an image and that was really important for me going through this process not to do the thing that I know how to do so well. For this I was really committed to the process of discovery.

What is really exciting to me is that it goes beyond the conceptual side of looking at the limits of our control or the detritus of the built environment. These images are abstract, they are white circles on black rectangles and yet they are literal and representational.

They are one to one scale and they are physically connected to that thing that is being photographed.

Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

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Andy Mattern : interview DT: It is important that they are giving you this amount of time to play, to discover and to fail potentially. I am interested in this moment of clarity or epiphany in the studio when you realize what you are doing and where it is going. My hope is that each of the artists begin to see where else it could go. That being said, how has this opportunity changed how you think?

AM: Okay, so let me speak for a moment about these prints and hopefully we will arrive at that. Getting back to the idea of these images being on the line between abstraction and representation. I found myself arranging the images and they have organized themselves in this magnetic manner and they feel like they want to come together in these groups and families of images.

DT: The storm shelter is an architecture of necessity, but your experience of these subterranean spaces is much different, it’s unnecessary. Thinking of experience, maybe talk about what you have learned about Oklahoma, the landscape or the psychology of the weather patterns, can you speak to your newish experience of Oklahoma through this?

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AM: Yeah, that inevitably brings up the social component which is something else that you pointed out when we met last time. I have been really pleasantly surprised. I am essentially a tourist in these spaces, I am using them when they are not needed and yet I have been through one storm season in Oklahoma and I have had to seek shelter twice. And both times were scary. I didn’t know what was happening, if it was serious or not. The news tends to pump things up with storm chasers and it’s on every radio station and sirens are going off and yet the next day when I mentioned it to friends, they sort of shrugged their shoulders and were like “that was nothing, I just went outside and stood on my porch to drink a beer”. There is this really weird tension between dire immediacy and the mundane.

DT: I love that idea of the unfamiliar about this project in general.

Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

AM: Yes it pushed me socially to do that. At one point I started going door to door. That was really freaky for me, I had a spiel with a clipboard and my business card from OSU and I had a letter that I drafted with a picture of myself in case they weren’t home and I could leave it there. And what was really surprising for me in every case except for one, everybody that I talked to immediately agreed and were really warm and invited me into their shelter on the spot to do my project. Most people said: “sure no problem let me show it to you!” and I ended up having conversations with these people. Some of them are my neighbors and some are from random places of all ages, races and economic statuses so that process and experience was really meaningful to me. This project forced me to do what I don’t want to do which is knock on a door and explain myself. As a private citizen of the world, if someone comes to my door, I am usually suspicious and usually not happy that they are there.

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Andy Mattern, Shelter (detail), 2016-2017, installation.

DT: Well it is a disruption. It’s your space.

AM: And because of that it was uncomfortable for me to be the person that I loathe at my own door. And yet I think it helped me craft a statement of things that I initially balk at when someone comes to the door. I would say, “Hello, my name is Andy Mattern and I am a professor at OSU. I am not selling anything I am doing an art project and I wonder if I could talk to you for a moment about it?” And remarkably they were warm about it. In fact there was one guy that had an ADA lift in his shelter, an older man whose wife has dementia and he had the ADA device in his shelter for him and his wife that runs on a car battery and when I knocked on his door he was immediately inviting and welcoming and we went over to the shelter and he let me do my project and he asked if I wouldn’t mind hooking up his battery to charge it while I was down there. I was able to provide a minor service for this guy while doing my project and that was cool.

DT: That goes back to that idea of disruption. Not just being the person knocking on their door but the fact of the matter is when you are having to go into these shelters it is a disruption you are going to a place where you don’t want to have to go and there is a little bit of the unknown there as well. I like that there was a psychological test there for you.

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Andy Mattern : interview AM: Well, yes it really was there. It is useful to go through this process and come out the other end of it even with there being some turmoil. When I was in the middle of this I did have some moments where I was really nervous. I have to do this thing and the only thing you can do is work and try and let time go on and try to stay true to some side of your sensibility and I did that I feel good about what’s come out of it.

DT: Okay good. That’s great. Well we could leave it there for now but I do want to leave it open in case anything else occurs to you that you want to discuss.

AM: Well thank you for your help.

DT: Yes thank you. This will be fun.

AM: Thanks Dana.

DT: Talk to you soon.

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AMYMCGIRK & JAMES MCGIRK

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Amy and James McGirk, Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value, 2016-2017, installation.

C O G N I T I V E A R T I F A C T S 63

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Amy and James McGirk, Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value, 2016-2017, installation.

AMY MCGIRK & JAMES MCGIRK : ARTIST STATEMENT A cognitive artifact is an artificial device designed to maintain, display or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function.

Our work aims to bring how we look at and consume art objects in an accessible, participatory aesthetic within a cultural analysis that is unique to Oklahoma.

The paintings act as tools, mediators between us and the world in dialogue and perception. Events and social practice are a form of artifact, a conceptual framework that helps us break from expected institutionalized norms.

The material remains of our action are meant to demarcate a particular quality or presence and raise questions about art, collecting and its value.

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AMY MCGIRK & JAMES MCGIRK : essay by James McGirk On one wall there is a pile of diminishing canvases; on another are patrons’ photographs clutching paintings, morphing into images of where they’ve hung those paintings in their homes; and on the third wall there is a text about art history, and beside it, an illuminated area for snapping photos. This is Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value; an experimental collaboration between a painter a writer, and a stream of visitors.

The painter is Amy McGirk, a geometric abstract painter and art professor; my name is James McGirk and I think of my work as documentation: primarily as creative nonfiction and photography. This is our first formal collaboration (other than a few art videos I made in grad school) and our first serious performative piece of work. It’s also the first piece of interactive artwork either of us has ever made.

The work is meant to both expose and challenge the idea of value in art and draw attention to the way that the perceptual apparatus belonging to a pair of strangers joining a close-knit community changes it (hence the title: Cognitive Artifacts, we draw attention to the way that our ‘cognitive artifacts’ change the aesthetics of our adopted home).

Visitors to Cognitive Artifacts are offered an opportunity to participate in an exchange drawing them into what for some would likely be an intimidating system: fine art as a cultural institution. As a viewer enters the exhibition and circulates through it, learning the rules, he or she will be are presented with a choice. They may choose a painting and take it home with them and keep it forever, but, in exchange, they must allow representations of themselves to be incorporated into Cognitive Artifacts, first by being photographed in the gallery holding the work they’ve selected, and later in their homes, revealing their own curatorial decision-making. For us the artists, this is an element of randomness: have they put the painting in a place of pride or did they stuff it in a drawer? Will they agree to the follow-up visit or refuse the visit?

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Amy and James McGirk, Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value, 2016-2017, installation.

Of course they may choose not to participate, but even rejecting a system requires acknowledging that it exists.

Their choice, whether to engage or not to engage, and if they do engage, at what level do they engage (sincere, insincere, suspicious, smug, gleeful, etc.) will seem all the more permanent after the exhibition is over and the art book documenting the event is released.

Ultimately this work aims to bring about how we as artists look at and consume art objects in an accessible, participatory aesthetic within a cultural analysis that is unique to Oklahoma.

The visual element of the work reflects this layer of artistic dabbling.

For three years, I took a daily sunset walk through the town of Tahlequah taking photographs, accumulating a database of more than 100,000 images. Amy McGirk culled these images and transformed them into paintings. A photograph is a carefully curated slice of an instant.

Choosing specific ones brings them into a new context, which is further emphasized by changing those images into paintings. Giving paintings away creates yet another layer of intervention. It’s a ritual. And a stand-in for cognition.

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Photographs and paintings are artifacts. And a cognitive artifact is an artificial device designed to maintain, display, or operate on information in order to serve a representational function. It’s a tool, mediating between the artist and the world. Social practices are artifacts too, conceptual frameworks guiding viewers and mediating their interactions with institutions. The space created between the elements of Cognitive Artifacts is an opportunity for our viewers to engage in a ritual revealing their assumptions about art and value. The fourth wall has been left open, allowing ingress and egress, creating circulation through the work, completing a circuit, reflecting and modulating the cognitive processes that are actually taking place in our viewers: repetition and habit formation, and the constant creation and destruction of information that undergirds what we perceive as consciousness. A slender skein of information lain over the unperceivable real.

Amy McGirk and I drove to Tahlequah, Oklahoma from New York City in January 2013. Her mother lives here and she had briefly visited, but I had never come close. Neither of us had ever lived in a city smaller than a couple of million before. Proclaiming yourself an artist in New York City is effortless, there’s an ecosystem devoted to art ranging from palaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art created by titans of industry to makeshift galleries in the basements of bodegas. Certainly some might roll their eyes at work, but it’s a serious vocation. Being out here in rural Oklahoma has forced us to confront a different but no less vibrant cultural community. We wanted to deliberately challenge our ingrained beliefs about art and art-making by bringing it directly to the public, not just collectors, professors, and experts.

The material remains of our actions—the paintings remaining within strangers’ houses, photographs of strangers’ faces and homes on the gallery wall and later printed in the pages of an art book—are meant to demarcate a particular presence and raise questions about art, collecting, and its value. Specifically we want to unshackle the idea of value from art. Or at least try to. Art should be transcendent. It must not be a status marker nor should it be a de facto financial instrument nor espouse an overt political agenda. To do so is to become something other than art. We believe that much of the anxiety surrounding artwork comes from what must seem like ridiculous prices for internationally famous (or even local artists’) work.

Amy and James McGirk, Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value, 2016-2017, installation.

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AMy MCGIRK & JAMES MCGIRK : essay by James McGirk

Giving away art effectively destroys its value in the short term as an exchange commodity. We want to disrupt the art market in the minds of our visitors in the hopes of revealing something that we as artists believe is far more important than monetary value. What does art have when every scrap of context has been changed? Does an essence remain?

We hope this show will bring us closer to an answer.

Amy & James McGirk, Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value, 2016-2017, installation.

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AMY MCGIRK : interview

AM: Yeah, I agree. It’s not like we are saying here is this exhibition, here is our work, here is this object, here you go; it really is a year-long process that has to develop. So it makes more sense actually.

DT: So tell me where you are at right now with the Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value?

How are you feeling about the work as it stands?

Dialing... Ringing...

Amy McGirk: Hello?

Dana Turkovic: Hi Amy How Are You? AM: Okay, how are you? Sitting here with my kitty cat.

DT: That sounds fun and relaxing.

AM: Yeah.

DT: Great, so as I mentioned in my emails, I wanted to at least try to turn the text into something that is more reflective of how we have approached this process. How we actually talk to each other.

AM: Imagine that!

DT: I feel like if I do it this way it is more revealing of how we were able to work together. What we talk about. Because it is so focused on artists making art in Oklahoma, it’s really a way for me to understand a place as well.

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AM: Actually I am kind of scared to make it so public, I am at that point where I am ready to open my studio and start doing this. I am definitely pushing myself into a place that would not have been available to me, so I am scared and excited at the same time. But I think that once I get into the project fully it will be great, because it’s not just about hundreds of little paintings or the space, or having the open studio, it’s the dialogue. All of those things are combined, they can’t just be one thing, so I think that once all of those things come into play, I can see how it is going to be exciting and ultimately how I am going to learn from it.

DT: Perfect. I think that leads me to my next question: the idea is that you would be giving away these paintings, but I am wondering, is this an experiment that teaches you something about your own goals and your own limitations?

AM: Oh definitely, I think that every artist, on some level, has a personal force that is

driving that artist. With this, it’s not so much for me to just give out paintings and explain art but it’s more about getting to understand how people really look at it on some level… because art is easily misunderstood. Here, it’s not part of your daily life, you have to make an effort. I am really excited to do that with people, it’s going to be nice to open up my process to people too.

DT: So apart from what are you going to learn about yourself and your process, what are you hoping to learn from the receivers of this work, since the idea is that you are making multiple paintings and that you would be giving these away, working with James and chronicling how these paintings are received and who they are received by. What are you hoping to learn from those people?

AM: It is going to be interesting to see who will be a part of this co-experiment and then going forward with the opportunity to contact them after and to go to their home and photograph and document where they have put the painting. Maybe they put it in the trash. It really is up to them what they do with this and how they receive it. I really want to understand how different people live with this art. Or do they even think of it as art or do they think here’s something to pop on the wall because they feel obligated because I am coming over? It can be so many things, because ultimately as an artist, when I make paintings, once

they leave the studio I have no control over where they go or how they navigate the world. For me I want to learn how the “receiver” values art.

DT: So you would say that the craft isn’t perceived in the same way? It’s not valued in the same way? The craft of the painter is viewed and consumed a bit differently?

AM: Right. Exactly. We all have our hierarchies. I guess in a way I want to expose people and see reactions from people. Now, I am not going to tell other artists what to do but I am interested in seeing how people react to something that is equal to what they have or maybe better, I’m not sure, that would be up to them.

DT: Okay so I think that this project is becoming about an experience in visitor feedback, it’s giving you a level and certain layer of feedback that you seem to be looking for about who the audience is?

Because I think that when some artists are applying value to an object or artwork it’s really that they also have an understanding of who their audience is. They have a certain level of understanding from that audience in terms of what value they put on the work.

The audience really informs that.

AM: Right.

DT: But I also think that this project is a portrait of a place. Is that true?

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AMY MCGIRK : interview AM: It’s definitely going to be interesting. It’s going to be a wide range of people coming from different places. And of course the conversations about value. And I want to leave it open to them, if they think about this or they disagree with me and they take away the painting and they take away our conversation whatever that might be and if they want to think about it and want to continue some kind of dialogue, that would be really great too.

DT: I really like the idea of creating a visitor survey through exchange. You are giving up something to get something. The value is less monetary, and more about what knowledge you end up with. About who people are. One of the most interesting things about your and James’ project is how it will be received by each individual visitor, because not everybody is going to take a painting?

AM: Exactly! And it will also depend on what the paintings will be because it is not about the paintings. What I paint is almost irrelevant

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on some levels because if I am making all of these crispy hard-edged, abstract minimal works that I really like I feel like that might be too annoying or intimidating and it’s an acquired taste, I was thinking that it might be nice to vary the content of the paintings like maybe I would paint a cat or a mountain, things that exist in real life that people can relate to.

Although they might think it’s ugly because I am not going to paint 500 photorealistic paintings but I will do what I can!

DT: So the “receiver”, since someone is literally walking away with an object, is making an investment to become a part of the life of the work. To receive the piece, to care for the piece, to situate the piece. But part of your project is to follow up on that so this piece, project or installation doesn’t really end with the exhibition, each of these pieces have a life of their own, so what I like is that it is pointing to this idea of collecting art because I think a lot of collectors really feel that way about pieces that they purchase, in a very pure form is this idea of living with art.

AM: Yeah, we have probably both traded with friends and we have a lot of art around but I was thinking about this collecting aspect of “start a collection”. Here is a piece, it’s free.

Hopefully they will like the experience of living with the piece that it might spur on some would be collectors, which would be nice.

DT: Yes, I think that this is a project that can help explain why people are interested in collecting art and sometimes it is something as simple as being attracted to a particular memory. I like the parallel with why people not just consume art but also purchase it and live with it. A lot of it is storytelling.

AM: It is a product which you buy into to be consumed and it is so wrapped up in class and socio-economic status and that makes me sad, but that’s the way the world works.

There is no need to really learn about art, they don’t need to live with it, there is no awe. I think it would be nice to expose people to art or even just the conversation it might spark a curiosity that wasn’t there before.

DT: Now that we are speaking of the geography and being in Tahlequah, how did you get there?

AM: People are usually ask why you are here.

Tahlequah is off the map a little bit! Well my grandma is from here she lived here when Main Street was a dirt road with wagons and my mom grew up here too. My mom raised me in Florida but I moved to New York City and lived there for 15 years but then we came out here to be around my family, but we really just wanted to work on our stuff.

DT: And I think it provides a new perspective for you so that might be my next question. I learned a lot about Oklahoma just riding in the passenger seat of the car and quickly visiting these smaller towns but I was pleasantly surprised that you guys were there. I like that

idea that through this project you are trying to understand where you are.

AM: Yes definitely, I have roots here. Also, I have a strange relationship with place here, but I am glad that I have been here, I have learned things about my family that I didn’t know. I have been able to reflect on New York out here and just the fact that I have been able to do this project, there is no way I would be able to do this in New York. Its’ amazing really.

DT: So what have you thought of this process?

AM: I think it’s great, you are from St. Louis but you have been everywhere and lived in a lot of different places. I really like this, I feel like as an artist you can get a bit out there and this provides a foundation, you are the rock and it must be like herding cats!

DT: Oh definitely.

AM: I like that you are really grounded and have a lot of experience with this and I throw it out at you and you seem to get it!

DT: Well good. For me curating is a purely collaborative exercise with artists, but I think that leads me to my last question, about collaboration since you and James are working on this project together, can you tell me a little bit about how things work for you? How do you bounce ideas off of each other? How does the work evolve through conversation just between the two of you?

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AM: It does help that we live together and if I think of something I can immediately bounce something off of him. There are these little starter moments where we can talk about the process, it is really organic, because we have known each other for so long, the project isn’t mine or his, ultimately James is doing all of the photography, provenance and spatial things. So it’s just an organic thing with us and it works out that way pretty easily.

DT: I think that’s great.

AM: We are definitely on the same page as far as how we look at art and visual culture. It’s important to have somebody whose opinion you trust and that you know you are on the same page with visually. I feel lucky in that respect.

DT: That’s great. We can probably leave it there for now, but my hope is that this text challenges a more didactic reading of this project and the exhibition.

AM: I think that’s great, you want people to think about it!

DT: Right! Hopefully it doesn’t get anyone in trouble. I am not looking for something specific thematically because I think that’s almost inherent with the way artists work now and where contemporary art has gone but in my mind I could already see where this exhibition was going in terms of storytelling. That’s the choice, I just wanted to illustrate the artistic process and the curatorial process and how they worked together.

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AM: Yes, I am really process orientated as well, even being a painter!

DT: Okay I like that, so let’s leave it there for now.

AM: Thank you for your time!

DT: It was good to talk to you!

JAMES MCGIRK : interview Dialing… Ringing…

James McGirk: Hello?

Dana Turkovic: Hi James.

JM: Hi Dana how are you?

DT: Okay how are you?

JM: Oh not too bad.

DT: So much of this project from my end is about the conversation, the research and talking with the artists about where the work could go over a period of a year and even now things are still being developed, reflecting a moment in time for your projects.

I had a lot of questions for Amy in terms of what her goals were for Cognitive Artifacts: Art and Value.

What are you hoping to learn from the project?

JM: It’s kind of changed from when we both conceived of the idea. I have been doing a lot of writing. I have always lived in huge cities. I was born in London and I grew up in New Delhi and Amy and I lived in New York for 13 years and I have been reflecting on that history bearing down. Coming here, one of the things that struck me the most is, for example, that I would meet a family and then I would see these streets with their last names and it occurred to me that this history wasn’t as chaotic and jumbled as it was in a place like New York. You can see the layers and how everything is formed. So when Amy and I started talking about this I had been writing and thinking a little bit about how to convey that, but we were thinking of ways to interact and create a layer on top of Oklahoma.

DT: Okay to piggy back on that idea. We touched on this idea of community, originally when I first met the both you we had such a great conversation.

But these projects do modify over time, they change, reality sets in or there is a road block and you have to rethink something. I find those moments interesting. Can you talk about the writing aspect of this project as it connects to the function of what Amy is doing with the paintings?

JM: I am a non-fiction writer. The difference between fiction and non-fiction rather than creating a world, you are responding to something and handling that reaction. Basically the writing

is going take place once we start interacting with people. At first I will just be taking field notes based on the experience kind of like an ethnographer, someone who infiltrates communities not to ingratiate but to make themselves as small as possible in order to observe. This would be creating our own rituals and me writing down those reactions and putting it all together. From that reaction, the challenge is how to parse what it is that you are feeling and translate that through the research you have been doing. It’s always a chaotic process. So the writing will be a description and a reaction to that description. I have been doing some amateur photography so now we are going to be documenting people’s homes and what these people are doing with these paintings. What we are hoping to do too is to create a publication to add another element to give back to people. So I am just about to start writing, right now I am just observing. It’s a funny process.

DT: That’s good. This exhibition is just a moment in time in this artist’s process, the time and the funding is part of a larger goal in the development the deepening of the artist’s practice. The experience of your particular installation is one that is ongoing, the objects are just part of a much larger experience in that it is not a finished thing. And I think it will be important to communicate that especially with what you and Amy are doing. Because your writing and your document are something that people might not see or experience. It is this living thing that goes beyond the exhibition.

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JAMES MCGIRK : interview JM: That’s a really interesting way to look at it.

It’s comforting on one level because it makes it out to be this living and breathing thing, it’s not a static thing on a wall and it really is what we are doing with our project, it is an intervention into the community. This year long project has certainly changed my practice and given me the time to experiment with different things. I was writing these narcissistic first person essays for the past couple of years and this has forced me to tear myself out of that so for just the writing alone it has helped me. It has also forced Amy and me to collaborate and has pushed us both out of our comfort zones because we both have very strong visions of what our work is.

DT: Maybe you could speak to that a little bit.

Why or how would you explain the collaboration?

Why is it important that you inform each-others practice but is actually consumed as one thing?

JM: Art has always been a massive part of our relationship and we have always called our relationship a conversation. This is a big moment for the two of us, it has been somber and bittersweet. This has come at an important time in our lives.

DT: Going back to this idea of integration into the community, it makes me think about this act of Amy giving away these pictures. The work is talking about this idea of value and it made me think and question, what do you find valuable, if

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you are willing to give something away, does it mean it doesn’t have any value for you, are there expectations from the receiver to apply a value?

There and there is this other question, why are you giving me this painting? Why do you want to document this? There will be a level of convincing to do. Some people love anything that’s free.

Then other people will say: “wait a second what is this?” Those are the people that are going to be interesting to write about and document because I love this negotiation of giving something to somebody that may not want it. Do you want to talk about that?

JM: One of the ways we started thinking about this is that a lot of art is extremely overpriced and I think there is a lot of anxiety about value and authenticity. Amy is very sensitive to this, she has always hated the idea of someone paying a lot of money for her work but also it was a way to disperse this new layer of stuff onto our reality.

Cognitive Artifacts is also about this idea of the remainders of your life, when you die there is this stuff, and when someone dies and you are looking at their stuff it is divorced from that person for the first time and it’s just stuff.

DT: So I think there is an idea of legacy with this project?

JM: Yes certainly. What is art? How does art fit into that? What makes it special? How can we transmit this idea of this thing that we devoted our lives to, this pursuit of the sublime in a way, how can we transmit some feeling of that to someone who may have not had the chance to experience that and how do we do that on their terms, by allowing us to intrude into the their house and take a picture of the piece.

This negotiation. I was telling someone about the project and they said: “well we could hang it in the garage and then that way you don’t have to go into the house to take pictures!”

DT: It is also pushing the boundaries of one’s comfort level. You are going into someone’s safe space where they are not necessarily willing for you to go. Especially with the documenting element it is about negotiation. Is there anything else you wanted to add about this process of Art 365 or more specifically what you are hoping to do with the text, what final form it might take?

JM: I am in the process of reacting still, but this Art 365 opportunity has been an incredible boost.

Just on a community level, it has allowed me to experiment with photography and video and there is a direct benefit to my students. My students were interested in doing some multimedia stuff, so I thought why don’t we learn how to make videos and use this editing software together?

There have been a lot of neat little side effects so it really has been more than just a benefit to Amy and me. In terms of the text, I want to push out of my comfort zone, it is easy for me to crank out a quasi-humorous, quasi-cerebral or detached view, typical creative writing, but with this I want to try and inhabit it a little bit and try to get across that habitation. For the catalog entry I was thinking more of an ethnographic report.

Paul Fussell was a huge influence on my work, he wrote this hilarious book called Class, it was doing this same thing where he was trying to imagine a class system in the 1980s in the US. I love that ethnographic approach, I would like to erase myself out of it a little bit and just turn off my chattering ego and maybe push into the community a bit more instead of projecting my

will onto this and just letting the thing that I am reacting to breathe a little bit more. I think right now that is my guiding principle.

DT: I am looking forward to the exhibition, and I have been enjoying this process. My hope for the artists is that they keep pushing this so that there is some community benefit ultimately or some small change has happened. If it is with the artists or a group of people. Maybe those changes are not necessarily quantifiable but that’s the hope.

JM: Oklahoma is a really unusual state. It has its own aesthetic feel to it. It’s much stronger than a lot of states that I have lived in. What you really have is about 2 million people in the metro areas and the other 1.5 million scattered around the state. I’m not sure I am still wrapping my head around it. People here are proud of their state but there is a lot of humility maybe because they aren’t quite south, not quite western, and not quite southwestern. What is truly unique here are the tornados but more importantly this really is the most Native American state apart from maybe Alaska? So it’s a strange confluence. Also, the history, it is incredibly ruthless and bloody.

DT: Anything else you want to add?

JM: I think if anything else come springs to mind we can reach out.

DT: Okay!

JM: Wonderful talking to you.

DT: You too and I will talk to you guys soon then!

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Kelly Rogers, Tales of Woah: One in Three, 2016-2017, hand-stitched embroidered tapestry.

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KELLY ROGERS : ARTIST STATEMENT Tales of Woah: One in Three is a 12-foot, hand-stitched embroidered tapestry. The needleand-thread drawing is a collection of individually rendered portraits of young women and girls, one-third of which are illuminated with ink and adorned with gold thread. Stitching is used as a healing metaphor in response to the prevalence of abuse and trauma Oklahoma children face. Statistics show that one in three girls in Oklahoma County is sexually abused by her 18th birthday.

The multitude of figures is intentionally overwhelming in number, though each figure is represented with loving depiction and minute detail of faces, hands, clothing, and childhood objects—asserting each identity in a sea of stats. The exposed reverse side of the canvas expresses the raw and complex effect of trauma, while the drawing itself brings to bear an often-forbidden conversation about the condition of Oklahoma women and girls. Tales of Woah reimagines a familiar expression, converting the pity of “woe” to an awestruck “woah” honoring the experience of survivors, and giving reverence to the grit of human resilience.

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left : Art 365 audience viewing Tales of Woah: One in Three. right : Tales of Woah: One in Three, 2016-2017. (detail), hand-stitched embroidered tapestry.

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Kelly Rogers, Tales of Woah: One in Three, 2016-2017, hand-stitched embroidered tapestry.

KELLY ROGERS : response by Kyle Cohlmia Innocence Rendered Whoa – how did we get to this place?

These tiny stitches make out the lines to our fragile boundaries, bodies that fade into the backdrop – black thread quilting us at an early age, created with delicate hands that embroider and nurture and expose our innocent grit.

When we are like clouds – feminine structures of ephemera where we carry our woe in cirrus white, circulating oxygen, and for eighteen years, we are stuck here, swinging, diving, running, jumping, breathing together to create a landscape of our own.

When we are one in three – drug from play too soon, with knotted ties that expose our messy veins, we became the unsung heroes with pink rosy cheeks blushed from summer mornings, barefoot, tying our shoe for the first time, or in rain boots waiting for puddles – where a string became a jump rope made for the horizon.

We are the voices of laughter and squeals of joy when presented with anything that the sun touches.

You are Bosch with gold lining – illuminating our resilience – not a triptych, but triple the innocence, because there is no vantage point in the garden of earthly delights.

We float, we fade and grow into adults. Our trauma disappears into tales of awestruck, where our departure from here is not a triumph, but rather an escape from invisible borders, a release from the constant scroll of memories, and where we can place our feet firmly on the ground, finally asking, where are we going from here?

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KELLY ROGERS : interview Dialing… Ringing…

Kelly Rogers: Hello? Dana?

Dana Turkovic: Hi How are you?

KR: Good.

DT: So I read the preview for your work in Art 365 in OVAC’s newsletter. It’s nice to see the images in there, they look great. It’s amazing it really does take this long to make the art and work through the ideas, but they get modified through studio time and conversation and I think that’s an important component to this project.

KR: Yes and all of the unknowns!

DT: Yes I think that is important to communicate to other artists reading about this particular Art 365. I want to thank OVAC because this is a great opportunity for the artists, not just about the funding but to give the artists this experience working on their ideas over time through this process.

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Do you want to talk a little bit about what your experience has been?

KR: Yes, I really want to echo something you were just saying about what it is like to have a year of studio time on a specific project and this isn’t something I would have been able to accomplish within the restraints of life and budget but even the conceptual aspect of it. It has been really consequential for me, getting into this project and working on this idea for this year and it’s really poignant for me because there is a lot of letting go for me right now.

DT: Well that’s good that Art 365 has provided to you the time to develop this project and to put a year into something that you might not have been able to otherwise.

KR: Absolutely. This particular idea talking about 1 in 3 of abuse and childhood trauma in my county and in my hometown. Working on a topic like this, it’s not like we don’t talk about these things but ruminating on this stitching and realizing that this is not necessarily just one big drawing but also tiny little portraits. It’s like sitting at the table with this heavy topic and a big chapter of my story, it was strangely empowering because I asked myself do I really want to say what I think I want to say, on this platform? Once I realized that I absolutely did, this is a rare opportunity and this is something that isn’t being discussed and it needs to come out into the open.

The other piece of that is will I be believed or disbelieved, am I disclosing too much? No. Once upon a time it was me being afraid of somebody else and now I am the one that doesn’t have to hide. It was really empowering for me to be in that place and that is something that this project gave me. I have always been the one hiding being concerned about who might find out and frankly this has been a way for me to tell my story and a way that I can honor the experience of people who have shared what it is like to live through trauma.

This is why art has always saved my life and this is why I turn to the creative process because it will do magical stuff like this for you. That was a long answer but it has been healing for me.

DT: I am happy to hear that you have been able to do that. To be honest when I first met you during our studio visit I felt like here is this person that helps a lot of people in her day job and it was almost like this was my opportunity to give something to you, this was a challenge for you and I know that something good could come out of it.

KR: Right, thank you.

DT: It’s just a way to frame different conversations, but I think this is going to be an important project for you, not just personally but for your artistic practice and I had to make those decisions about each of the artists, about what I thought they could gain from this. So tell me about the canvas, where is it right now, how many figures do you have?

KR: At least a couple of hundred, possibly three hundred. I haven’t added the ink to it yet, the canvas is at about 7 ½ feet high and the length is about 10 feet. It is about 75% done with the stitching. The drawing took a lot longer than I reckoned. I tried to create the figures so that you could read them from all angles, but some of the figures on the top on either on swings or floating in water and then you can see them falling towards the bottom where they all appear to be standing, that wasn’t planned but they are floating together in space.

DT: I made this note when we talked at the retreat in November of this personal versus impersonal and there is something obviously personal but it transcends your story it becomes about something else, these other stories. The personal in this piece is the “act of stitching” it’s the stitching of the image but where it becomes impersonal is in the quantity of figures on the canvas, it becomes impersonal when a viewer can’t quite comprehend every single element on the canvas and picture plane that you are so overwhelmed by the quantity.

KR: Yes, that’s exactly it, you took that out of my sketchbook! I want it to be overwhelming on purpose.

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KELLY ROGERS : interview

I can see why there is some hesitance though, once you go in there and do that, you are committed to it. I totally understand that you don’t want to do something that you will regret.

DT: Okay so in thinking about this statistic one in three, how literally do you want to be with that?

KR: Yes and this is a journal of a very important year for me and my practice, it’s a little bit selfish, but with the stitching, my mind can check out at this point, but it is a screeching halt time when I am faced with having to touch this with something permanent.

KR: So yes thinking about how I illustrate the one in three, I have some golden thread and I want to illuminate and just highlight without filling it in like a coloring sheet, instead I will focus on what they are wearing and holding.

DT: I like that.

KR: So if I let it be ambiguous, then I have a way for everyone who sees to ask themselves if they see can see themselves in there, if I mess with the faces and hair too much I might take that away from somebody.

DT: What I like about the potential for color in this piece, the way you are describing it, is as a viewer, you may just see these moments and shapes and it has the potential for abstraction. So the work is both figurative and abstract at the same time, both formally and conceptually.

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DT: I don’t think artists are used to hearing this from curators but one of the things I am trying to communicate in a bigger way is that this is a moment in time in your practice. Yes the ultimate goal is to have this object in the space and present this final project but the point of all of this is that this is going to change your practice. That this opportunity is pushing the boundary of where your comfort zone might be or where you might move away from something you have been doing into something new. My hope is that each project will change the way that artist thinks.

KR: I would like to interject here about that very thing, initially I was telling myself that I wouldn’t do anything else until this project was done but after the election one of my studio mates was having a conversation, asking ourselves how did this happen? It was a really weird week for us but I said I just want to write a love letter to every human I see and she said we have to make that happen. So fast forward, I partnered with two other artists and we wrote a love letter to everyone in the neighborhood, a local poet wrote the letter, we sent it to as many people as we could reach, and it was the first time I did something that big that wasn’t tied to a picture plane. It was the first time I did something that didn’t feel too big for me. I definitely think it was because of what you are talking about “this moment” because this moment for me was an impossibility. I have never done art like this. That was completely accidental.

DT: That’s perfect that is what I am trying to say. When you ask a curator to “organize” an exhibition it really is that person’s vision, they have to figure out how each of these five people fit into something that they want communicate about what they have learned, these are the puzzle pieces.

KR: That’s interesting with all of the unknowns that each of us brought into this.

DT: Well, yes, each are very different practices, but there is something in my mind that is connecting all of these things, that’s kind of a side note, when I picked these five people I could see thematically where this exhibition was going. Each project will yield to this more abstract thinking regarding this opportunity. Is there anything else you want to add or talk about with Tales of Whoa? Or discuss or mention?

If it is important, please email me. This can be the beginning.

DT: That is good.

KR: So yes I agree with you.

KR: The next step is figuring out the presentation of the work, I have some ideas I will email you.

DT: Okay talk to you soon.

KR: Okay great, conversation.

thank

you

for

this

DT: No. Thank you!

KR: This has been awesome I really enjoyed it. Have a good weekend.

DT: You too. Bye.

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A Dissonance of Parts & People : Artistic Practice in the Province

by James McAnally

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“This Midwest, a dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns…we over labor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time…”

William Gass, “Politics,” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Art outside the center, off the given grids, grows uneven in the sun. We are a dissonance of parts and people, a consonance of communities; we over labor as a rule. In the heart of the heart of the province, the place of the artist is still unstable, the country at times unkind. We can say “we” as a start though we are states away.

A longstanding game is to interpret artistic tendencies in specific cities in some kind of constellation, pitting the outposts against one another, and all against the center. The relative privileges of low rent and easy exhibitions, quick acclaim and soft connections, all the big fish-small pool languor that has remained more or less unchanged over the decades. The art world highlights these hierarchies of geography, fixing the artist in relation to place as one criteria among many that establishes value.

What, one asks, is an Oklahoma aesthetic? To arrive at an aesthetic through place or a place through an aesthetic is a particular kind of learning.

Does the place influence the artist or the artist shape the understanding of the place? In a few cursory visits, always seemingly organized by OVAC (a telling, if informal, observation), I have seen explosive indigenous critique, survivalist architectural statements, painting at its extremities, and text turned inward.

These strategies speak of the place and its contexts, but always slip out of them as well towards other centers of feeling.

What is an Oklahoma aesthetic? Some sum of art that exceeds our categories.

Writing from the Midwest, we assume we live in the margins, though this is always a question of perspective. What do we see differently when we look from this place? Could we critique the coasts from

here, as if they are the deviation, the outer lands of the arts? Whom is correct in this?

The one who refuses the other? We are both correct, irreconcilable. We are both incorrect, unrealizable.

In a far-reaching, unsurpassed analysis, Terry Smith considered “The Provincialism Problem” in a 1974 Artforum essay, assessing the artist’s place in relation to the center as a system of perpetual alienation. As he puts it, provincialism is precisely “an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values.” This analysis has proved perennial as the authority of the art world always seems to come from elsewhere, unlocalizable but nonetheless impossible to trespass. Importantly, provincialism is defined less in relation to geography and more in relation to power. The Harlem artist unable to enter circulation within dominant discourses is as provincial as the self-taught sculptor in Norman.

Though externally imposed, these hierarchies are internally adopted and reaffirmed in the ways we tend to conceive of the art world as a series of ascensions towards recognition or acclaim. Art’s value, in this view, isn’t immanent - it is always determined elsewhere. In this, it is negotiated as an industry of recognition and circulation rather than the inherent value of expression, experimentation and creation we wish to claim as its central power. Cultural values trump cultural value, and this is where the slip begins.

Pete Froslie, Aesthetics of Capital (detail), 2016-2017, mixed media installation.

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Smith’s focus was primarily on Australian art communities, notably pre-internet, but the problem persists for all our present provinces. The more one wishes to appear in dialogue with the center, the more likely one will be a step behind. The extent to which one embraces the place itself, the more likely a new form will emerge. Further, a dismissal of the contingencies of the center is necessary for an escape. This is the most, and least, risky proposition for the artist in this Midwest. Our outlook never really urban, never rural either. How do we enlarge?

As Smith says, “irresolutions such as these pervade the culture. Artists live uneasily within it. None can feel part of a community large enough, diverse enough, to be selfsustaining––an illusion often given by New York.” He goes on, proposing that “as long as strong metropolitan centers like New York continue to define the state of play, and other centers continue to accept the rules of the game, all the other centers will be provincial, ipso facto. As the situation stands, the provincial artist cannot choose not to be provincial.” The process that sifts these definitions is a structural hierarchy built up by an economy and a self reproducing social strata, and maintained by mass acquiescence to its assumptions.

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The question, then, is how do we embrace new rules? Without a concentrated field that encompasses work outside of the centers as sites of emergence and possibility, we are accepting a provincial position.

Towards a new definition, an accelerated provincialism: Our avant garde is circular we are at the forefront only when we are at the edges. As we push our boundaries outward, we enlarge the space for all. The further from the center we are, the more likely we will be at an expansive new border.

“My god, I said, this is my country, but must my country go so far…?”

These questions of provincialism and place become more stark in the debates that irregularly rage over the tenuous existence of the NEA. The National Endowment for the Arts was conceived as one way to re-see the nation’s artists — if not necessarily to establish an American aesthetic, or abolish provincial positions, then at least to gather the disparate activities across the country into a persistent vision.

Lyndon Johnson’s statements on the signing of the Arts and Humanities bill in 1965 seem prescient again today: “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a Nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”

This admittedly propogandizing proposition prompts other questions: What does the state of art reveal today about our nation?

Can this revelation be more clearly seen in our accumulated artworks or in the work of art itself? What vision is revealed in the dismissal of our national endowment?

To reach back into earlier observations, perhaps place shapes the artist less than the artist reveals the place.

In this same founding speech, Johnson acknowledged, “We in America have not always been kind to the artists and the scholars who are the creators and the keepers of our vision.” This rhetoric is pleasantly out of date in an age when the NEA is presented as “welfare for cultural elitists” that is “beyond reform,” as the Heritage Foundation would have it. That America is unkind to artists is less the point than that our unkindness is just another word for blindness.

One of the agency’s primary outcomes is that it has created ”irreplaceable records of the intellectual and ideological challenges that have gripped America.” Even as the agency enters shutdown procedures, it is continuing to hold this space. As artists work precariously and advocate for living wages, or as organizations such as OVAC thread by with the thinnest of margins, this absence of support is itself a record of intellectual and ideological conflict. This is a moment of cultural transformation, an inflection point in which our understanding of art in relation to the nation is bent to the point of a break. The attacks on the NEA are a symptom of other ruptures. We fail to cohere here, we fail to cohabitate.

Jabee Williams performs as a part of Imaginary Spaces.

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Our provincialisms and ongoing schisms of rhetoric, politics and aesthetics also record this incoherence, this unkindness. Looking out from the center in this dissonance of parts and people, we are an unwitting advance guard. Out here in the continuous unscrolling red states, the culture wars were always unfinished. Our art is war-torn, our capacity for vision worn-thin. Is this embattled barrenness our present American aesthetic? Can we re-see a way forward from here?

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A Common Decency In 1990, Congress amended the NEA’s grant criteria to include a “common decency” statute that meant awards must “take into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public”. When the legislation was passed, the phrase was a euphemism for moral or ideological values that much contemporary art purportedly trespassed.

What if, instead of an enclosure into this limiting ideological definition, we crack open the phrase into new understandings of art, federal funding, and the ways artists and organizations interact? Could common decency not be detourned as an advocacy of a more expansive art world, a commons?

Could common decency be redefined as the advocacy and expansion of art and the processes that make it possible as a common good? Can we consider the ethical implications, the indecency, of stripping away art’s centrality as a mode of expression in our lives, an organizational principle in our communities, or an opening into new horizons that free expression and far-reaching experimentation enables?

Detail of Narciso Argüelles, Imaginary Spaces, 2016-2017, installation.

The NEA we are fighting for today is just a murmur of its original intent - one whose run lasted just 12 years before being crippled through a sequence of political fights starting in 1981.

Yet it is also a murmur of its actual potential. We need to fight for abundance in the face of austerity, articulating expansive alternatives rather than defending diminishing territories.

It is our endowment, a collective cultural inheritance. This falls out to the provinces, where we all are now, living out an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values.

What is lost in our arguments on behalf of the NEA, or even others distant from our immediate experience, is some sense of the commonwealth, or more simply, the commons. That we not only hope for, but work for the success of another we are not proximate to, one whose success superficially has nothing to do with our own. The cultural commons - common decency - is an underlying vision of any advocacy around federally supported arts activity, but also a fundamental opposition to the hierarchical position of the province.

Art is a commons, as the air is. It requires not just practice, but protection; not just preservation, but an expanded vision. As its founding makes clear, this is the true horizon of the NEA and, further, for our own artistic practices in relation to the present.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks at the Signing of the Arts and Humanities Bill., September 29, 1965 ibid 4 National Endowment for the Arts: A History 1965 - 2008, editors Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham 5 Language taken from H.R. Bill 5769 2

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INDEX & BIOS Robert Bailey is assistant professor of art history at the University of Oklahoma with affiliate faculty status in film and media studies. He received his PhD in the history of art and architecture from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also studied philosophy. Bailey researches and teaches the history of modern and contemporary art as well as the historiography and methodology of art history. His work focuses on how artists and art historians configure relations of theory and practice amidst broader artistic, intellectual, and political developments.

Kyle Cohlmia is a curator, writer, and educator living in Oklahoma City. Kyle received her BA in art history from the University of Kansas and MA in education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She completed the Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship through Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition in 2016 and currently works as the curator of exhibitions for the Melton Gallery at the University of Central Oklahoma. She reads some of her work at the Red Dirt Poetry open mic; and she serves on the poetry committee for IAO Gallery.

James McAnally is an artist, curator and critic who has served as a founder and executive director of The Luminary, in St. Louis, MO. McAnally is also the editor and co-founder of Temporary Art Review. In his artistic practice, he works as a part of the collaborative US English. He has exhibited, written and lectured for venues such as the Walker Art Center, Queens Museum, Pulitzer Arts Foundation with Ballroom Marfa, Kadist Art Foundation, Gwangju Biennial (with INCA Seattle), Cannonball, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Kansas City Art Institute, Transformer, and Moore College of Art and Design, among others. McAnally is a 2015 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing.

Emily L. Newman is presently associate professor of art history at Texas A&M University-Commerce, specializing in contemporary art, gender studies, and popular culture. Her current book, The Female Body Image in Contemporary Art: Fatness, Dieting, Self-Harm, and Eating Disorders, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2018. Additionally, she is coediting a book on ABC Family/Freeform, in the same vein as The Lifetime Network: Essays on “Television for Women� in the 21st Century (2016) coedited with Emily Witsell.

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.

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Art 365 audience.

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EXHIBITION PARTNERS & SPONSORS 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

Since 1976, the Norman Arts Council has supported Norman’s rich history of public art, events and arts education. Our exhibits, art walks, arts education experiences, and festivals draw more than 532,000 visitors each year to a community that supports the arts and understands that arts are what make Norman beautiful. normanarts.org

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OKLAHOMA VISUAL ARTS COALTION : board of directors Bob Curtis Gina Ellis

Oklahoma City

Oklahoma City : Treasurer

Hillary Farrell Jon Fisher

Oklahoma City

Moore

Susan Green

Tulsa : President

Ariana Jakub

Tulsa

John Marshall

Oklahoma City : Vice President

Travis Mason Oklahoma City Laura Massenat Renee Porter

Oklahoma City

Norman

Amy Rockett-Todd Tulsa Douglas Sorocco

Oklahoma City

Dana Templeton Oklahoma City Chris Winland Dean Wyatt

Oklahoma City

Owasso

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Exhibition Partners

Sponsors

Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation

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The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

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Art 365 audience viewing Kelly Rogers, Tales of Woah: One in Three, 2016-2017, hand-stitched embroidered tapestry.