Jordan Vinyard: Command + C, Command + C, Command + C
TAC Gallery
Aug. 2 – 24, 2024
Kinetic sculpture — sculpture that moves — is a tough beast to tame. It tends to move slowly, and often strangely, and like its predecessor, the modern static sculpture, it leans towards subtlety. The current show up at TAC Gallery, Jordan Vinyard’s Command + C, Command + C, Command + C, forgets these facts. It pushes too much good work into too small a space, and doesn’t provide enough contextualization to allow Vinyard’s slow, thoughtful pieces to be felt.
My first issue stems not from the art, but with the respect given it. When I walked in during a slow midday moment, the person staffing the desk leaned out and said, “Yes, we’re open, and no, I don’t know what any of this is.” What a wildly dismissive thing to say as someone staffing a fine art gallery. Part of TAC’s mission is to support local artists, and yet one of its volunteers verbally sneered at the art the second a viewer walked in the door. I couldn’t help but think: What if I were the artist? Would the volunteer even know? The volunteer referred to the artist as “he,” which was my first tipoff that this particular person wasn’t trained on the work. (Vinyard teaches at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma and directs the Art Wrecker Gallery, both in Chickasha.) It’s disappointing. Difficult abstract art like this deserves to be lifted up, not quietly sniffed at. I hope that in the future the people staffing TAC Gallery know what the work is, and can at least talk about it without a sense of ironic scorn.
On to the work. The piece that greets one immediately is All The King’s Horses, a fantastically strange and large sculpture of silicone and bandage clips, slowly being moved by actuators. Behind two shifting holes play videos of horses: one shows a horse’s eye, the other a horse’s mouth. The piece feels distressing and intriguing all at once, not only for the abrupt and loud movement of the actuators but also for the close framing of the horse which is constantly being changed: there’s a sense of tunnel vision to it that stuck with me long after leaving the show.