Reflections

Inspired by Oklahoma Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition, Bright Golden Haze, Arts Council Oklahoma City’s Spotlight Concert series will celebrate the “bright future” of Oklahoma City’s entertainment community with unforgettable live performances from April through August.

DeadCenter Film will partner with twenty high schools and technology centers in towns across Oklahoma to capture on film the most beautiful light in each town at different times of day. DeadCenter will screen the combined footage,
projected onto the new Oklahoma City Convention Center, on June 13 during the 2020 DeadCenter Film Festival. The video will tour the towns of each participating school in the fall, where it will be projected onto a building of their choice. After the tour, the video will be released online.

Oklahoma artist Nathan Pratt’s installation will transform Myriad Gardens with nature’s most nostalgic glow—fireflies. This public art installation will tap into the innocence of childhood, allowing visitors of all ages to experience the magic of the summers of youth. The installation will evoke summer evenings when the world starts to change, lit by the flickering glow of fireflies. The mixed-media pieces will be illuminated with pulsing LED lights, constructed to complement nature during the day and illuminate the Gardens at night.

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum will present works by artists from around the world and Oklahoma, each providing a unique perspective on how environment, identity and perception are shaped through the medium of light. The installation will consist of a series of murals by artist John Salame ap plied directly to the large windows of the museum’s main entrance and gallery hall, depicting diverse landscapes of Oklahoma. These murals, commissioned by a local artist, will literally bring in the “bright golden haze” from the opening line of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! by using the sun itself as a medium.

Oklahoma City Ballet will present an original ballet inspired by Bright Golden Haze. Trainee program coordinator and recently retired professional dancer Amanda Herd Popejoy will choreograph a premiere work with eight to fifteen members of the trainee program at Oklahoma City Ballet’s Yvonne Chouteau School. Popejoy will incorporate light into the dancers’ costumes and ideally perform outside in a relatively dark space. All performances, which are planned for multiple locations in April and May, will be free to the public.

The Oklahoma City Museum of Art will present its own satellite exhibition, The Art of Light. Inspired by the exploration of light as a tool to create space, The Art of Light seeks to communicate the unique visual experiences provided by different forms of light when they are employed to achieve artistic ends. The centerpiece of this exhibition is Barbara Astman’s Present Tense, comprised of a set of flashlights whose lenses are masked by pictures of faces. The work projects floating, smiling faces onto darkened surfaces. Additionally, the Museum will present Laser Drawing by Forrest Myers and Balthazar by Stanley Landsman. Laser Drawing, the first laser artwork ever created, was originally installed at the nightclub Max’s Kansas City in New York. Present Tense and Laser Drawing have never been shown at the museum.

This summer, the Oklahoma City University School of Visual Arts will display Olafur Eliasson’s Shadow Projection Lamp at the Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery inside the Norick Art Center on campus. An art educator will help students interpret the projection lamp and encourage children to create original artworks inspired by it. Students will learn about monochromatic color and discuss the use of light and dark in Eliasson’s work. They will then explore the concentric circle and symmetrical shapes, possibly using them in their own artwork.

The Friends of the Oklahoma History Center and the OHC exhibit team will create an outdoor installation to complement Bright Golden Haze. An interactive fabric maze, up to 600 linear feet of bright yellow fabric, will
snake in and around a grassy area of the OHC grounds. Visitors will find three interactives: Two will emulate a candle carousel highlighting images from the opening song from Oklahoma! such as “cattle standin’ like statues” and “corn as high as an elephant’s eye.” The largest interactive will be a zoetrope, creating the illusion of movement through a rapid succession of static images that relate to the musical.

Science Museum Oklahoma’s Prismatic Projections coincides with Bright Golden Haze. This kaleidoscopic new experience takes a scientific approach to interpreting the beautiful colors we see in the sunrise. The foundation of the experience involves capturing light and diffracting it onto a “canvas” for guests to investigate the resulting colorful spectrum. These rainbows of light are our guide for explaining the rich gold, orange and red tones in our unique Oklahoma sunrises—a beautiful “bright golden haze.”

Sparks fly as Kandy-painted and chromed-out lowriders scrape through the streets. In the wake of collective marginalization during the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” of the 1940s, Mexican Americans responded by creating new ways of positively expressing themselves: Enter the lowrider. At its core, the art of lowriders embody a lifestyle focused on a sense of hope for the future—a bright and golden future, exemplified by the chrome and gold adorning the cars. This photography exhibition and related programming will examine the multifaceted ways in which lowrider culture leverages light and highly reflective surfaces to give visual voice to the Mexican American experience.

The Unexpected Us is a collaboration between Scissortail Park and artists Denise Duong and Gabriel Friedman. The installation will explore the magic of transformation, featuring a massive woven willow stick “hut” in the shape of a bird, with a golden pulsating light suspended within a willow orb at the center. The installation will include a single entrance to the center, where a secondary woven willow sphere containing a golden LED light will be programmed to pulsate at the speed of a gentle heartbeat. The structure will be built upon a semi-circular foundation of laminated, rot-resistant cedar lumber.

Artists Nathan Hendrix and Stephen Tyler’s low-voltage lighting installation will represent the colors of the Oklahoma sunset. A grid-work of steel cable will attach at multiple anchor points on top of the west face of the SixTwelve building, spanning the adjacent lawn and terminating on steel poles along the existing fence line. The grid will incorporate pixel-controlled LEDs, programmed with static looks for special events or a mapped video display. At dusk, the work will emulate the colors and patterns of the surrounding sky as the sun sets and night takes hold.

The Melton Gallery at UCO plans a multifaceted installation to engage with the themes of light, space, identity, and perception explored in Bright Golden Haze. The installation will include a light sculpture by Olafur Eliasson, a sound composition by Dr. Christina Giacona and Patrick Conlon, and a short non-narrative film by Kato Buss. Eliasson’s 1m3 Light features twenty-four halogen bulbs positioned to delineate one cubic meter of light in a dark room filled with fog. The thirty-minute, surround sound experience will be played on a loop, and the cinematic element will enhance the viewer’s experience on how identity and perception are shaped through the medium of light.