Commodified
December 2019 - February 2020
Graduate Studios, University of Nevada Las Vegas (VICE)
Curated by the Vegas Institute for Contemporary Engagement
Photo Credit to Krystal Ramirez
This exhibition uses photographs, installations, drawings, paintings, and sculptures to create a store like atmosphere, with products on the shelf. The show occupies the front lobby of an old, repurposed Carl’s Jr. A site-responsive installation, the VICE team curated around the themes of capitalism, commodity, and how that affects identity. The work in this exhibition explores issues of indigenous language, colonialism, queer politics, climate change, and the factory.
TOPICAL BREACH: sun, sand, self
February 2016- March 2016 - MAINSITE Contemporary Art, Norman, OK
As a part of the Oklahoma Art Writing Curatorial Fellowship, TOPICAL BREACH is one of three exhibitions curated by fellows in the program.
an awkward pause, a broken fourth wall, a pun gone wrong.
Topical Breach investigates identity through play, documentation, and intimacy. The results in the form of videos, performances, and installations are awkward and clever, sincere and ironic, clumsy and refined.
Artists include: Creighton Baxter, Tahlia Ball, Hope Esser, Kara Hearn, Molly O’Connor
PASSWORDS: secrets in text
Nov. 2015- Jan. 2016 - IAO Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK
Words help qualify our existence, and written language, though not universal, shapes our design, culture and economy. Text in art has been used to clarify pictures, denote craftsmanship and signify importance, on plaques, markers and milestones. Text has also been central in conceptual art as text can be used as a vehicle to help boil down ideas to their simplest forms and shapes.
These six Oklahoma artists use text in their work to convey personal and universal narratives to divulge important, discrete secrets. Text becomes a way to obscure and reveal simultaneously as each artist uses a variety of media to transcend the personal. These artists are all diverse, but a common theme emerges: the grappling with identity and personal secrets in an age of ubiquitous information.
Artists: Samantha Dillehay, Ryan Harris, Zachary Presley, Laura Reese, Katy Seals, Kerri Shadid
Press:
2014 - as part of START Norman with the Norman Arts Council and the Insitute for Quality Communities at the University of Oklahoma.
Threshold: the promised land explores the Lumber Yard space as a site for transformation. The artists have created work that examines themes around building and construction, natural for a lumberyard, which also reminds us of our future potential.
What blossomed most boldly within the core of each installation is the importance of “home” and how we set roots wherever we live long enough to do so. In the early
years of the city’s second century, the artists join Norman’s citizens as we express the vibrancy of our community and to celebrate the diversity that makes it an amazing place to live.
Threshold, as the visual arts component of the StART Project, has been a way to give artists the space and tools to inspire our community, create change, and imagine a new promised land for us to live in.
-heather ahtone & Laura Reese, curators
Artists: Marwin Begaye, Eyakem Gulilat, Heather Clark Hilliard, Alexandra Knox, Erin Latham, Cedar Marie, Leigh Martin, Ellen Moershel, and Michael Wilson, all from Norman; Joseph Erb, Tulsa; Sarah Hearn and The Wriders, Oklahoma City; and C. Maxx Stevens, Boulder, CO
Oklahoma Printmaking Network Exchange
Organized by Laurence Reese and Theresa Riemer.
May 2017 through 2019, touring statewide:
Artspace at Untitled, Oklahoma City, May 19-June 10
Lightwell gallery, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, Aug 19-Sep 9
East Central Univerisyt, Ada, OK, September 12 - October 15
Ponca City Arts Center, June 2017
Leslie Powell Foundation, Lawton; March 2018
Goddard Art Center, Ardmore; Summer 2018
Resonator, Norman
Artists of the Arbuckles’ Jean Carr Gallery, Sulphur
Graceful Arts Gallery, Alva
The Oklahoma Printmaking Network is a virtual network of artists who identify as printmakers, no matter how traditional or conceptual their media and technique. The OPN was founded with the intent of connecting printmakers across the state. Initially an online listserv, the OPN started hosting physical events, including meetups, critiques and workshops.
As part of this mission of connecting artists, the OPN organized its first statewide printmaking exchange. 25 printmakers created an original edition of prints in response to the theme "Making Your Mark." This portfolio of 25 prints ranges in printmaking techniques: lithography, collagraph, monotype, etching, woodblock, silkscreen, letterpress, and more. Each artist interpreted the theme differently, creating a variety of subject matters that all showcase the diversity of printmakers across the state. Artists range from established career artists to students, and vary in location across the state, from Oklahoma City, Lawton, Tulsa, Norman, and more. The exhibition is juried by Catherine Prose, Associate Professor of Printmaking at Midwestern State University, Texas.
In part, this portfolio is a time capsule, and captures a glimpse of what kind of work is being made across the state. Printmaking is a broad term for several specific techniques, but also connotes an approach to artistic practice. Printmakers are craftspeople, with oral and kinetic traditions. There is a particular culture in the print shop. Bringing printmakers together, across distance and career levels, we want to see connections and collaborations form between previous strangers.
Printmaking is a democratizing media: it has long been used as a media for mass communication. This diverse group of prints shows the potential for art as a means to connect artists across geography and media. The Oklahoma Printmaking Network hopes this exhibition can show the arts public the breadth and depth of printmaking as a medium, as well as share the works being made by artists statewide.
Artists:
Una Anderson
Chelsie Austin
Betty Bowen-Hancock
Amena Butler
Annalisa Campbell
Sharon Childress
Alicia Saltinas Marie Clark
Kjelshus Collins
Adrienne Day
Ginna Dowling
Nathan Evans
Steven Goodwin
Theresa Hultberg
Kay Kirby (Oklahoma Letterpress)
Erin Latham
Darci Lenker
Mike Litzau
Tanya Mattek
Laurence Myers Reese
Tracey Riemer
James Adam Sanders
Katy Seals
Gloria Shows
Rob Smith
Laura Sullivan
Jim Weaver
Jessica Wilson
Kristi Wyatt
May Yang
GLITCH/ANALOG
2014 - MAINSITE Contemporary Art, Norman, OK
Currently, local, and perhaps even national, attitudes within the arts remain skeptical towards new artistic media (such as apps, web-based art, or digital interactive art), as some of those who work in traditional media might view rapid shifts in technology as an existential threat to their art form.
Some artists, navigating between “new aesthetic”, digital programs and traditional styles and technologies, defy these classifications.
Their work exists in the space between traditional and innovative; ironic and sincere.
Our lives now can be altered by a keystroke, hastening the merger of the “real” and “virtual”.
This is a show by artists working on these frontiers of technology and ideas.
Experimental and visceral as well as established and detached, these works are harbingers of the surreal world we may inhabit–ready or not–as technology continues its relentless march.
Artists: Jessica Ann, Brian Dunn, M Paul Kirby, Grace Grothaus Grimm, Allin KHG, K Edward van Osdol, Dillon Votaw, Raymond Weilacher, Stuart Whitis
MAPPING CHANGE
2014 - Individual Artists of Oklahoma
Since first approved and funded by voters in 1993, the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS), Oklahoma City’s visionary capital improvement program for new and upgraded sports, recreation, entertainment, has allowed citizens to invest in their city to improve the quality of life through a debt-free program. In MAPPING CHANGE, six artists expand upon their own interactions with OKC and the impact of MAPS.
Through these projects, the artists become an example of the very process they review, in which people, through artistic expression, add social capital to their community. They invite us to see a future in which the continued public support for such projects, by deepening our sense of community, can enhance our city’s growth, both economically and culturally.
Artists: Tommy Ball, Grace Grothaus, Richard McKown, Hugh Meade, Todd Stewart, Kristen Vails
GLITCH/ANALOGOUS
2015 - Living Arts, Tulsa, OK
A reiteration of the 2014 exhibition in Norman, GLITCH/ANALOGOUS further investigates the hybridity of the digital and physical worlds. As haptic technological devices enter our daily lives, the boundaries between the analog realm and the cyber world become blurred.
Seven artists explore life with technology. In the work of Jessica Ann, 3D printed manifestations on time reveal that our future is, perhaps, looking more and more like “shit.” Artists like Brian Dunn and Dillon Votaw draw upon the collective conscious of the internet to draw connections in the real world. Julianne Clark and Grace Grothaus Grimm both explore how backlit screens affect our lives and explore the effects on the natural. Whereas Aaron Robinson and Daniel Sutliff use technology to create more psychedelic visualization. Using the building blocks of technology, data and pixels, with the digital and plastic surfaces, they create abstract interpretations of the world around them.
Artists: Jessica Ann, Julianne Clark, Brian Dunn, Grace Grothaus Grimm, Aaron Robinson, Daniel Sutliff, Dillon Votaw
Press:
EESTI MAESTRID: Estonian Masters and their Students in America
2013 - MAINSITE Contemporary Art, Norman, OK
A small former-Soviet state on the Baltic sea, Estonia is not well-known, or well discussed, but it’s international printmaking and film festivals attract the masters of their crafts. The art there is often funded by the public, and also, more often than not, testing the limits of what is acceptable.
The curation of shows from American artists to Estonia and vice versa hopes to bridge an international dialogue between two similar, yet vastly different, places of Oklahoma and Estonia. The conversation will not end at exhibitions but continue through travel, interactions and exchanges in the future.
Artists: Toomas Kuusing, Al Paldrok, Peetr Allik, Taje Tross, Locomotif, Eva Ikart,
SLICE OF AMERICAN PIE: AMERICAN STUDENT PRINTMAKING IN ESTONIA
2013- In Graafika Festiva, Pärnu, Estonia
The works represented are meant to show just a fraction, or a slice, of the amazing work being done by American Printmaking Students. Gathered from national printmaking conferences, I sought to select works by a diverse range of artists all over the north american continent.
By taking this overseas to an international printmaking festival in Estonia. I hope to show the world the talent and learned skills present in our artists, and what our new generation of artist is making. THIS is the new frontier of art; I hope these artists will, in the future, be what we show to our students on what we want from art.
MOMENTUM TULSA 2012
2012 - Living Arts Tulsa
Momentum Tulsa is visionary in its ongoing cultivation of a vibrant arts ecology in Oklahoma. Designed to recognize and support artistic excellence and innovation, Momentum Tulsa 2012 introduces new work by 64 emerging artists living and working throughout the region.
The 2012 Spotlight artists - Samantha Dillehay, Amanda Sawyer, and Libby Williams - were given the opportunity to develop new work over a period of four months with financial support and the guidance and mentoring of a curatorial team.
While the Survey exhibition reveals the region’s authentic wealth of emerging talent, vision, and skill, the Spotlight exhibitions celebrate the incredible potential of individual artists realizing their ambition and goals in the context of a supportive and connective art community. It was important to us, as the exhibitions’ curators, to discover the region’s emerging talents as we also considered a broader national conversation about current contemporary art practice.
-Raechell Smith & Laura Reese Tulsa Momentum 2012 Curators
