SUNODOS: ACT OF ATTENTION
June 2, 2023 – August 12, 2023
As we are changed by the stories that happen in a place, so do we change a place by the stories we tell. sunodos is the intersection of both. The artworks on view evoke the meeting grounds between their makers and the natural world, welcoming viewers into these intimate story-spaces and inviting us to consider our place in nature.
Through paintings, photography, hand-built ceramics, mixed media, drawings, poetry, video, and zines, nine northeastern Oklahoma-based artists—Steve Blesch, Shane Brown, Darren Dirksen, Yatika Starr Fields, Nic Annette Miller, Hayley Nichols, Rachel Rector, Joseph Rushmore, and J. Preston Witt—engage questions of participation and reciprocity in our shared ecology.
This exhibition is curated by Liz Blood, Tulsa Artist Fellowship awardee, with Layla Mortadha, Curatorial Assistant.
The companion publication, Creative Field Guide to Northeastern Oklahoma, will be available for purchase.
“Sunodos is a Greek word that comes from hodos, meaning road (used to suggest a way or means), and the prefix sun-, meaning together. A sum of those two parts, sunodos can mean “meeting” or “assembly.” I think of it also as a meeting place, or a way together.”
Prominent working artists and queer community members whose works and/or objects are included in the exhibition include Pat Gordon, Lynn Riggs, Charles Bell, Lydia Cheshewalla, Karl Jones, Grace Fallon, Carle the Artist, Brad Lovett, Parker D. Wayne and the Oklahoma Fashion Alliance, Iván Alvarez, Chris VanDenhende, Matt Moffet and more. Additionally, C.Q.P.S. presents a slate of events where visitors engage with each other and the 2SLGBTQ+ community through artistic collaboration, fashion shows, film screenings and lectures, performance art presentations, site-specific installation interactions, and more.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Liz Blood is a writer, editor, and arts worker. Occasionally, she does print design. A lifelong Oklahoman, her work focuses on place, memory, and contemporary art. Her essays, journalism, and arts writing can be found in Menagerie Magazine, Cimarron Review, Columbia Journal, Hunger Mountain, Oklahoma Today, Art Focus, and elsewhere. She is a multi-year recipient of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was awarded the Fellowship's Arts Integration Award to make her book, Creative Field Guide to Northeastern Oklahoma, which features the work of more than 50 Oklahoma-based artists and writers. Blood co-founded Okiebug, a vintage Tulsa brand made anew as an independent publisher. She serves as contributing editor at Oklahoma Today magazine and was the season two and three writers’ assistant for the Peabody Award-winning FX Networks series Reservation Dogs. Blood is the curator of sunodos: act of attention.
Layla Mortadha (she/her/they/them) is a second-generation Iraqi-American writer and nonprofit/arts worker from the traditional lands of the Osage, Muscogee, and Cherokee Tribal Nations, which are now called Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is a proud graduate of Booker T. Washington High School and has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Tulsa, where she studied political philosophy, international affairs, and French. She is an assistant grant writer at The Parent Child Center of Tulsa and studio assistant to Tulsa Artist Fellow Liz Blood. Layla also writes in her free time. Her poetry draws upon transcultural/transgenerational narratives of anti-capitalist resistance, connection to land and nature, and love. Her poem “Sun Potion” was published in Today, Tomorrow, an exhibition curated by the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project in March 2023. Layla is the curatorial assistant for sunodos: act of attention.
Steve Blesch uses layers, patterns, and textures to create colorful multimedia pieces. Painting what he sees in his mind, he reinterprets his reality in 2-D. The things he obsesses over find their way into the background, center, and details of his work. Some of these themes include stories, nature, identity, life cycles, the future, his place in the present, and what we mean to each other. Steve held solo shows Some Years Stuck Together, at Oscillator Press in Norman, Oklahoma, in March 2023 and Oh, Send the Light at Clean Hands Gallery in Tulsa in January 2022. Steve and his wife Felix are the co-founders of Cat Castle, which hosts interactive, crowd-participatory art shows. He was raised for most of his childhood in Ramona, Oklahoma, and currently lives in Tulsa.
Shane Brown is an Oklahoma-based, Cherokee photographer and filmmaker documenting the present-day cultural landscape of the American West, experimenting with representations of time and motion, and working on a variety of film projects. Brown's documentary photography projects include In the Territories, views of Oklahoma, its convoluted histories and their present-day manifestations; Life Out There, an exploration of the Atomic Age-based mythology of the American West; and, Great Plains Schema, a survey of the ethos, archetypes, and myths of the Great Plains region. Over the last two decades, Brown has pursued freelance and creative projects in documentary and experimental photography and cinematography. Presently, Shane is the on-set still photographer for the Peabody Award-winning FX series, Reservation Dogs, created by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo. Other photography and cinematography clients and projects include The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Tiger King 2, Teton Trade Cloth, First Americans Museum, Smithsonian Magazine, American Indian Quarterly, Bob Dylan Archive, Woody Guthrie Archive, Yeti, Buffalo Nickel Creative Agency, and Love and Fury (2020), Mekko (2015), and This May Be the Last Time (2014), all feature-length films by director Sterlin Harjo. In 2022, Shane was part of a team of Wall Street Journal editors, journalists, and photographers nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism.
Darren Dirksen was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, on July 2, 1963. He graduated from Ponca City High School in 1982 and then served in the U.S. Army as a cannon crewmember. He later attended OSU Tech in Okmulgee, where he studied graphic arts. Dirksen is a self-taught oil painter drawing influence from artists of different time periods, such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Pre-Raphaelites (Waterhouse, Millais, Rossetti, etc.), M.C. Escher, Dali, and George Inness, among others. Dirksen paints on self-prepared masonite panels that he cuts into nontraditional shapes and sizes. He then designs and builds the frame to fit each painting. He paints his life “real and imagined,” using Oklahoma landscape as the background. Dirksen is also a sculptor, bow maker, and fossil collector. Before painting, he drew. He is represented by Joseph Gierek Fine Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Yatika Starr Fields is an artist with emphasis on studio painting. He is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a member of the Osage, Cherokee, and Mvskoke Nations. He attended the Art Institute of Boston and then lived in NYC for a decade. Yatika currently lives and works in Tulsa as an awardee of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His artistic endeavors have taken him around the world, working with institutions and museums in a continuous dialogue to help broaden the views of contemporary Native art. After graduating high school in Stillwater, Oklahoma, he studied landscape painting in Italy under mentorship guidance. His plein air painting practice has continued since that time and regularly informs his studio practice, keeping him aligned with natural qualities outside the studio. In recent years, his work has shifted to represent contemporary political terrains, often layered with figurative, cultural, and historical motifs. His compositions are colorful and dynamic, leaving the viewer to move their eyes and find elements relating to their own journey. From studio paintings to murals, an orchestrated landscape of unbounded possibilities and solutions are revealed, giving and creating space for new narratives to take shape.
Hayley Nichols is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her art practice experiments with ways of performing careful attention, studying the marks, movements and sounds created by our daily rituals. Through drawing, photography, conceptual intervention, ceramics, and sound, she facilitates a more subtle noticing of the world. This manifests in a preoccupation with the unintended, such as traces left by unconscious social gestures, slow wear on objects as we use them, the ephemera of mundane habits. Nichols holds a BFA from Oklahoma State University, where she studied graphic design and studio art. She recently returned to her hometown after a decade living and working in New York.
Nic Annette Miller is an interdisciplinary printmaker, designer, and teaching artist working at the intersection of education and access in American Sign Language (ASL) and using a variety of mediums to explore multicultural identities and connection to nature. For over a decade, Miller’s visual art practice has been based in drawing, woodcut printmaking, watercolor, sculpture, public installations, photography, video, and movement. Her body of work relies on public installations and community engagement to bridge a connection to the environment and the natural world.
Rachel Rector is a fine art film photographer whose work utilizes experimental film, cameraless photography, and historical printmaking techniques to evoke the ethereal, daydream quality of a nostalgic moment in nature. She often adds poetry, collage, and textile elements to her hand-printed photographs to convey sentiment. Her images have been published in Polaroid, Huffington Post, The Hand, Lenscratch, and displayed in galleries throughout the U.S. Rachel has developed educational workshops, believing that teaching 18th-century processes like cyanotypes and anthotypes captivate students' senses and encourages them to become more engaged with their environment. She is currently enjoying living in Tulsa.
Joseph Rushmore is a documentary photographer and multidisciplinary artist based in Tulsa whose work documents social upheaval and the cracks of the American myth. In 2018, he began working on a several-year-long project for The New York Times about Tulsa’s search for mass graves from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He expanded that project into his forthcoming book, “Commentary on the Apocalypse,” which examines the intersection of religion, politics, extremism, violence, and history. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Aftermath grant to continue this work. His photography has been published in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Der Spiegel, Stern Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Huffington Post, New Tulsa Star, Tulsa World, The Tulsa Voice, and in multiple features in The New York Times. He has published several zines and handmade books including, Year of the Cockroach and X (Cut Throat), hand-bound books (2023); January 6th, made in collaboration with Liz Blood and Joseph M. Giordano, published by Nighted Life (2022); I’ll Take You There, a self-published broadsheet newspaper (2021) and O’ River, published by Walls Divide Press (2019)—both created with collaborator Liz Blood. In July 2021, he held a solo exhibition of his work at the Center for Public Secrets in Tulsa and in August 2021, he was awarded a scholarship to the Magnum Long Term Mentorship program. He has participated in several group shows in Tulsa and co-founded the Sextet Collective in 2018.
J. Preston Witt is a writer and multi-disciplinary artist from Michigan. He has been supported by fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), the Luminarts Cultural Foundation (Chicago, IL), and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2020–present).
ABOUT FLAGSHIP
Tulsa Artist Fellowship inaugurated its Flagship public project space located at 112 N Boston Ave E, Tulsa, OK 74103 in Tulsa’s historic downtown district. The 2,421 square-foot building was designed as an integrated and dynamic platform for arts-centered community exchange.
Flagship programming includes screenings, panel/roundtable discussions, lectures, artist talks and interviews, literary resources, workshops, symposiums, as well as performances and public artworks, sound installations, and more.