ERRANT S PIRITS // ARTNOW: THE SOUL IS A WANDERER AT OKLAHOMA CONTEMPORARY

by Benjamin Murphy

Oklahoma is a complex place, rich with stories that represent a wild variety of experiences. With Oklahoma Contemporary’s most recent iteration of its biennial exhibition ArtNow, thirteen artists who work in the state plunge into their investigations of the past, today’s complicated truths, and what we might read as possibly liberated futures. Presented by Tulsa-based guest curator Lindsay Aveilhé, the exhibition takes its title The Soul is a Wanderer from former United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (b. 1951, Tulsa; Muscogee Nation). As her poem from 2000 “A Map to the Next World” tells us “The soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.” It also counsels us that “Crucial to finding the way is this: There is no beginning or end./ You must make your own map.”

Among the thirteen artists who endeavor to find their way through our shifting cultural landscape, I chose to take a close look at three who have created an exciting range of artworks utilizing language, video, earth, sculpture, performance, sound, and extended painting techniques.

Nathan Young: Plains Indian Sign Language II

“Heavy” and “surreal” is how Nathan Young (b. 1975, Tahlequah; Delaware Tribe of Lenape Indians) describes his video installation Plains Indian Sign Language II. Don’t be fooled by the innocuous-sounding title, the story it tells is as heavy as it gets. Calling the mythologized story of the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving “lies in history books,” Young’s telling asserts a darkness in these religious pilgrims. When the settlers arrive, Native Americans provide lifesaving assistance during the colonists’ first winter only to be later rewarded with death. Told using only hand gestures, silence becomes a salient character in this tale of undeserved aggression, one whose quiet delivery chillingly subverts the naïve version of America’s colonial origin story to make it emblematic of the attempt to silence Native Americans. Young’s visually plain and silent video packs a punch.

On a documentary field trip, Young encountered a tribal elder who told this version of the Mayflower story—a jarring and compelling response to negative collective memory. Within the frame of an old-school video art aesthetic, the video features Young’s cousin Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow) recounting the story through the “picture writing” of Plains Indian Sign Language—itself the basis for American Sign Language—whose short phrases are subtitled. Young’s approach can be traced back to his sound and music studies at Bard College, where he began to understand that silence is a part of sound and the world lacks true silence. The work pulls its audience into an insurgent reaction to America’s original myth to experience an ambivalence born of tension between authenticity and invention.

Ashanti Chaplin: Earth Elegy

Inspired by Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, Ashanti Chaplin (b. 1981, Tulsa) uses sculpture, video, sound, and performance to connect with memory and place in a reflection on the 13 historically Black towns in Oklahoma: Boley, Brooksville, Clearview, Grayson, Langston, Lima, Red Bird, Rentiesville, Summit, Taft, Tatums, Tullahassee, and Vernon. Acting as a landscape, but not in a traditional sense, the work’s video projection depicts earth and soil up close, presenting us with an abstracted landscape. Accompanying the video is an obelisk standing 13 feet high. This reverential monument is constructed from ground clay collected from each of the 13 towns and mixed with polymer. Its exterior resembles adobe building materials but with an ombré effect achieved by the different colors of clay, whose mixed colors move from dark to light in hues ranging from deep red and purple to pale ochre. Shifting musical compositions, inspired by the landscapes associated with each town, play in the exhibition space. On ArtNow’s opening night, Chaplin gave a ritualized performance to invoke a spiritual connection with the earth.

Chaplin’s material and process are equally important to the experience as the piece’s visual and auditory components. Learning about Greenwood as a young person inspired a pride of place in Chaplin, and she felt a sense of wonder that compelled her to visit each one of these fabled all-Black towns. The process of collecting clay from each location began in August of 2022 with visits to Taft and Tallahassee. Soon, driving as far as Lima, Chaplin was awestruck by the beauty of the landscape connecting these towns. Accompanied by cellist and composer Gabriel Royal, her act of driving inspired the compositions that fill the gallery with sound. In Boley and Grayson, Mayors Dr. Francis Shelton and Leon Anderson greeted Chaplin with shovels. Looking for clay they explored creeks, ponds, and cemeteries so that history could become literally embedded in Chaplin’s materials for the project and bind the places from which it was excavated to its viewers’ consciousness. Earth Elegy ultimately offers a mediation on earth, placemaking, and the opportunities land provides to build new futures.

Molly Kaderka: Ferrous Form/Unform

Through a reimagined approach to landscape painting, Molly Kaderka (b. 1989, Austin, TX) can be thought to respond to the circular journey central to Harjo’s text. By removing the linear or horizontal paradigm associated with traditional landscape imagery, with Ferrous Form/ Unform Kaderka constructs a spherical model that positions an earthly rock formation around a celestial center. The viewer encounters two immersive, large-scale paintings, presented as a diptych, each with a diameter of 15 feet. While modifying the notion of landscape, Kaderka also confronts our traditional understanding of painting by utilizing paper marbling, painting, and drawing and laminating her materials to the wall. The texture of the marbled paper is used to depict circular rock formations whose brick-red coloring, thanks to the marbling process, references Oklahoma’s iron-rich, ferrous soil. The scale of these swirling landscapes and seemingly infinite vistas tend to evoke an overwhelming sense of wonderment and contemplation in their viewers.

Kaderka examines the theme of transformation through contrast. While Ferrous Form remains a stable image that perhaps symbolizes our present state of being, its counterpart Ferrous Unform enacts a more visually kinetic circular landscape fractured in a centrifugal array of earthly fragments that seem to be flung away from the work’s dislocated center. Viewed together, they speak to our tenuous control over our surroundings, since nature is in a constant state of change, by exploring the relationship of ground to sky, circular composition, and states of coherence and coming apart. Kaderka has created a visual narrative that echoes Harjo’s statement that “there is no beginning or end.”

Just as we are made from stars, there is no ending, only an infinite unfolding of transformation. With ArtNow, Oklahoma

Contemporary and curator Aveilhé put forward a diverse range of artists who testify to this poetic truth, showing us along the way a glimpse of Oklahoma’s soul so that we might consider our past, present, and future together.

ArtNow: The Soul is a Wanderer can be seen from June 22 through January 15, 2024, at Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City.

BENJAMIN MURPHY is a Canadian-born artist who sees the language of art as an expanding one and utilizes the mediums of painting, drawing, printmaking, and digital fabrication. His work examines our evolving understanding of the physical world, technology, and the anthropogenic impacts of climate change. Murphy is the Assistant Professor of Studio Art at OSU and holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Oklahoma. You can learn more about his work at benjaminmurphy.art .