Concept/OK: Focus An Oklahoma and Kansas City Exchange by Kirsten Olds and Blair Schulman
Grace Grothaus’ project, Re(view) in Situ, will take viewers on a walking tour to visit the locations that inspired her paintings. Using her smartphone application, they can use their phone as a looking glass to view an imaginary world based on that exact location.
Concept/OK: Art in Oklahoma, a new exhibition from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC), will open at the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa’s Hardesty Arts Center (AHHA) on December 16, 2012, with a reception from 1-5 pm. Inviting audiences to investigate current art making in Oklahoma, the exhibition presents a broad survey of Oklahoma artists in context with artists from the region. Liza Statton, an independent curator based in Australia, curated the Concept/OK: Focus portion of the exhibition. Statton selected four Focus artists from both Oklahoma and Kansas City. Each of these artists will present new work at the December exhibition in Tulsa before developing an exhibition in Kansas City, at the Charlotte Street Foundation’s La Esquina gallery. By presenting artists from two locations in two places, Concept/OK: Focus builds on the connections between artists and art scenes in our region. Statton likened these networks to a mobile phone coverage map, where the areas of dense coverage would convey where artists’ “concepts, intentions, and interests converge and overlap in multiple ways.” Discussing her selection of the nine Focus artists, Statton commented on the innovative ways in which
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they explored the intersections of material and form. She also pointed out they use their works as means to meditate on the human condition: our changing relationships, environment, and cultural products. As the first installment of a recurring biennial exhibition, Concept/OK marks just one node in the nexus of artistic communication and collaboration that creates a vital, sustainable arts scene in this region.
FOCUS ARTISTS: OKLAHOMA by Kirsten Olds Each of the four Oklahoma-based Focus artists is engaged with currents in the contemporary art world and yet is also producing art deeply rooted in the Oklahoma experience. Using different visual languages and modes of address, they explore the transformation of our environment—by technology, culture, politics, history, and consumption. Grace Grothaus In her proposed work for the Concept/OK exhibition, Re(view) in Situ, Tulsa artist Grace Grothaus takes viewers on the equivalent of a Situationist dérive through the streets of downtown Tulsa, structuring an opportunity
for them to experience the urban landscape anew. After downloading an application to their smartphones or picking up a hard copy handout, viewers follow a map to specific street locations. Once there, by looking through the viewfinder on their smartphone camera, they see that exact location as it has been painted by Grothaus. She has very literally substituted her own vision of the scene for yours. And yet her vision, enabled by the mobile app (called Augmented Reality), actually calls into question how technology mediates our experience of the world, how it may have supplanted the real with the virtual. Her paintings themselves, are back-lit abstractions of the urban environment. In them, Grothaus has developed a fresh perspective on the language of abstraction, drawn more from the intersecting worlds of circuit boards, maps, and petri dishes than the austere formalism of early twentieth century icons of modernism. Her paintings are equivalents for the experiences she hopes to prompt in viewers. They express the conditions of landscape at the crossroads, not simply between nature and the built environment, but between the real and the simulated. At the heart of Re(view) in Situ is a simple question, one we should all ask of ourselves, “do we understand the world we live in anymore?”