Curated by Jennifer Scanlan
Originally set to open in March of 2020, but postponed to August, Bright Golden Haze was the inaugural exhibition at Oklahoma Contemporary’s new downtown location. The exhibition explored ways in which artists use light to create place, both geographic and conceptual and takes its name from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic musical Oklahoma!
Highlights of the exhibition include included Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s Black glass eclipse, which emits a golden light that cancels all color; Tavares Strachan’s neon installation I Belong Here (White), which asks who gets to decide who belongs where in America; a specially commissioned version of Leo Villareal’s newest work, Star Ceiling; and Alicia Eggert’s The Sun, a celebration of poetry of the Flaming Lips.
The exhibition featured recent works by originators of the Light and Space Movement James Turrell and Robert Irwin as well as works by the current generation of artists exploring light technology such as Camille Utterback, whose interactive installation invites viewers to respond to one another’s movement to create a digital “place” on a shared screen.
Integral to the exhibition were indigenous perspectives on light and place, from a site-specific installation by Marianne Nicolson (Dzawada’enuxw First Nation) that provides an alternative view of the Milky Way to a new landscape painting commissioned from Oklahoma artist Yatika Fields (Osage/Cherokee/Creek).
The exhibition was accompanied by a hard cover catalog.
