Pitriarchy Presents
Positive Space Tulsa
July 29-August 19, 2023
Google the name “Pitriarchy,” and you’ll get an instant question back: “Did you mean patriarchy?” Would I have rolled my eyes quite as hard at that had I not just spent an evening dancing in public to electronica songs with titles like “Panties in a Wad” and “Nipple Confusion,” immediately after seeing the Barbie movie? Possibly not. That search result is exactly the kind of dark joke the artists who shared those songs might delight in harnessing—the key word being “delight.”
Those artists—interdisciplinary provocateurs Loraine Wible (from France, by way of Cincinnati), Kyle Browne (from Boston), and the anonymous composer known as Pitriarchy (from Planet Pitriarchy; more on that later)—appeared in Tulsa in “Pitriarchy Presents,” a piece of collaborative performance art that brought equal parts feminist critique and joyful absurdity to a little room in the Pearl District (and to all my future research inquiries, apparently). During their recent week-long residency at Positive Space, a womxn-focused gallery led by Nicole Finley, they built a rollicking, incisive body of work that drew from their individual interests in power, cultural mythology, sculptural play, and subversive punk.