Storm’s Comin’: Solo Works by Katherine Hair Eagle
Positive Space Tulsa
Through Saturday, August 29
Walking into Positive Space gallery to take in the opening of their newest exhibit, Katherine Hair Eagle’s Storm’s Comin’, I immediately trod on a clump of pink and yellow crepe that I suspect was part of a piece of art. Don’t get the wrong idea about how I felt about this show, though. The reason I trampled across the threshold like a single-minded buffalo was to get to the absolutely striking paintings on the gallery walls.
But my decimation was fitting, in a way, because the crepe seemed to be an extension of the exhibit’s anchor piece, Strike, a sculptural installation that embodies the plight of billions of birds who die every year in the United States by crashing into windows. Each papier-mâché bird, anchored to the ceiling by a delicate brass wire and on a collision course with the gallery’s front window, is modeled after a real species, from hummingbirds to scissortail flycatchers. The whole ceiling is draped with these neon beauties, gliding toward an unforgivingly hard surface.
That queasy feeling of looming doom unites all the show’s pieces. Storm’s Comin,’ per the artist statement, is “a collection of works made in response to this time that we are living through of rapidly degrading environmental changes.” Each of the acrylic paintings features animals against a sinister backdrop—storm clouds, lightning strikes, wildfires—in uneasy communion with these landscapes.
My first assumption was that these hares and wolves and prairie chickens were fleeing from the destruction, but after spending more time with the pieces, that interpretation feels incomplete. After all, where can they run when the whole world is under attack? These animals feel more like they’re flying, halfway between this world and another one we haven’t yet destroyed.