May Yang, Tulsa, Great Wall, Ten color screenprint with chine colle, 22”x15”
Momentum Tulsa Spotlight 2010 by Kelsey Karper
Momentum: Art Doesn’t Stand Still is a program of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC) designed to foster Oklahoma’s young artistic talent. Featuring artists ages 30 and younger working in all media, Momentum Tulsa will be held at Living Arts of Tulsa, 307 E. Brady on October 9, 8 pm – Midnight. To further encourage artists to develop in-depth projects, OVAC created Momentum Spotlight, an opportunity for three artists to create new works for Momentum Tulsa. The three selected artists each receive an honorarium of $1,750 and several months of interaction with the Momentum curators.
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Ahmadi is an Iranian artist working towards her master of fine arts (MFA) at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman. Her project, entitled Anti-Consume Tale, is a short stop-motion animation about cultural consumption and the process of losing relationships with objects. Ahmadi creates every piece of the animation from hand, including the paper cut out puppets that become alive in her films, as well as their environments. The final work will be presented in three episodes, each exploring the idea of cultural objects becoming products to be consumed and replaced quickly – processed, digested and thrown away.
This year’s lead curator is Shannon Fitzgerald, an independent curator living in Oklahoma City and formerly Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Sarah Jesse was selected as the Emerging Curator. She is a writer and educator working as the Berson Director of Education and Public Programs at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa.
“I think the thoughts and ideas [of the curators] have helped me a lot,” Ahmadi said of the experience so far working with the curators. “They helped me to see the ‘cultural consumption’ idea from another point of view, made by a more western experience than my own experience which is more eastern. Cultural consumption is a reality that is happening all around the world and I think putting all these experiences and thoughts together can add a lot to the body of work.”
Together, Fitzgerald and Jesse selected the three artists for Momentum Spotlight: Tara Najd Ahmadi, Oklahoma City; Sherwin R. Tibayan, Norman; and May Yang, Tulsa.
Tibayan, also an MFA student at OU, is investigating the role that images, or photographic evidence, play in the way we remember our experiences. In his project, Screen Captured, he pulls images from found
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