"Spatial Poems"
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship
through August 9, 2025
I’m standing in a quiet room, looking at a brick wall. There’s a soft clunk behind me, a sound like a warped piece of machinery. My eyes track downward to a video in which a curly-haired woman in a grassy field is buttoning and unbuttoning a pink housedress. Tracking left, they catch curves of salmon and ultramarine at the edge of something enormous. I hear the clunk again—this time it happens just as the woman finishes the very top button.
Full afternoon sun pushes through a window, turning the floor into parallelograms; to my right, three giant yellow circles hover triangularly on a sky-blue expanse. Clunk, clunk. I turn around—a semicircular, two-step movement that reveals the source of the sound as a scuffed aluminum disc rotating inside a frame with a disc-sized hole in it. As I look at it I remember seeing, in the frame of the window, now behind me, a tiny pewter sculpture adorned with light green stems, at the ends of which perch slightly wilted yellow flowers. Clunk.
Is this real life, or an art happening? In Spatial Poems, it’s both.
I wouldn’t have even thought of “turning around” as being “semicircular” until I realized how many shapes and rhythms and distances my body was interacting with in the current exhibit at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship. I didn’t mean to make a movement that harmonized with all this! After a few minutes standing in this space, I was laughing with the recognition that any person hanging out with the pieces in this show is completing the show.
Give yourself at least a good 30 minutes in Spatial Poems, ideally more. It’s one of the most extraordinary art experiences I’ve had in Tulsa this year, curated by Cassidy Petrazzi1 in response to a performance score by the video and installation artist Mary Lucier.
A score, in this context, is a set of instructions that can be performed by anyone anywhere. This one reads as follows: