Source Material

Slightly Blurred And mirrored, the words appear to hover, as if spoken in the air. Visitors to the gleaming sculpture by Austrian artist Eva Schlegel in Campbell Art Park outside Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City will see a fractured reflection of themselves and the surrounding area, the shapes formed from metal and mirrors responding to the light of the shifting sky and turbulent qualities of the Oklahoma weather. The place, too, is subtly embedded in the work, with writing by Oklahoma authors printed on shelflike angles of glass.

“The texts themselves create a sort of narrative space, a space behind the visible space, an atmosphere of past, future, and present at the same time—a dense imagination,” Schlegel says.

Multiple Voices is the artist’s first public artwork in the United States. She concentrated on works by Indigenous writers for the selected words, with the sculpture’s etched text including excerpts from writings by Kimberly Blaeser, and Tulsa poets Steve Bellin-Oka and Joy Harjo. “I loved reading the stories and learning about the colorful and powerful language of these Indigenous writers,” Schlegel says.

Along with the large-scale sculptural artworks that Schlegel has been acclaimed for since 1995 (when she angled a glass wall of text against the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale), she has exhibited her installations, objects, and photography around the world. This includes shows at the New Museum in New York, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, and pieces in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New York Public Library, and the Albertina in Vienna.

While her sculptures tend to have flat surfaces made of mirrors and steel that interact with their surroundings, her photographs are liminal meditations on ordinary objects or settings where details are obscured and perspectives are skewed, creating abstraction out of everyday moments. The turn of a hallway or frame of a door becomes a distillation of shape and light; figures of people are altered into haunting shadows.

One of these photographic works, Untitled (231), was featured in Bright Golden Haze, the inaugural exhibition at Oklahoma Contemporary. The experience of touring the building led her to be inspired by its design and the way its shining exterior lined with aluminum “fins” was built to respond to its environment. Schlegel envisions Multiple Voices as an artwork that doubles as a community space, relating to the building while offering a distinctive setting for events, performances, readings, or gatherings.

“A public installation first has to work as a piece of art, but it must show a reason for being there,” she says. “This sculpture serves as a sign that art is taking place here. You can experience infinity by stepping on the mirror elements; by reflecting the sky and the grass at the same time, you have the feeling of endless columns into depth and into the skies.”

Multiple Voices with its reflective surface of words will transform throughout the seasons, whether catching clouds passing overhead on a sunny spring afternoon or absorbing the subdued gray of an overcast winter day, its mutable quality continuously offering new perspectives on the familiar.