Is Everything Okay?
Positive Space
August 25-September 30, 2023
In April, The Oklahoman reported that Oklahoma ranked lowest in gender equity nationally. Additionally, Equaldex’s 2023 Equality Index placed the state at #47 for LGBTQ+ rights. These metrics, along with the daily experiences of fear and marginalization they reinforce, set the stage for the group exhibition Is Everything Okay?, on view at Positive Space through September 30.
Curated by Tulsa-based artist Allison Ward, Is Everything Okay? consists of eighteen works of photography, sculpture, video, and sound that honor the mundane and extraordinary lives of femme and queer Oklahomans. In doing so, the show embraces vast tonal shifts, accommodating both haunting and humorous works and highlighting the simultaneously disturbing and absurd nature of identity-based discrimination.
On the haunting end of the spectrum are works like Destiny Green’s uncanny photograph Home, which features a figure in a white shirt and cuffed jeans holding a child outside a dimly lit two-story brick house, staring at the camera with an expression like a deer in headlights. Another haunting photograph is Emily Singleton’s Getting Ready, in which three figures apply makeup around a vanity while, outside the trio’s window, a fourth figure approaches the house. The approaching figure, whose face is obscured by window blinds, seems to represent an outsider looking in on established rituals of femininity.