Presented by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in its Flagship space June 6 through Aug. 9, Spatial Poems offers a special opportunity for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship recipients, Tulsa residents and the broader art community to see complex and dynamic work that has never been exhibited in the city before.
To challenge the audience's method of perception and push beyond frameworks of passive art consumption, curator and art historian Cassidy Petrazzi selected works from six contemporary, internationally known artists to support her thesis of Spatial Poems: Art happens in the encounter with life.
"The separation between art and life can be collapsed in a way that we often don't fully experience in our everyday lives—and that is something as simple as looking out your car window as you're driving or cooking food with other people. These can be really sacred and creative acts," says Petrazzi.
You're invited to Spatial Poems to not consume the art. […]
[…] Spatial Poems has been long in the making, with at least two years of work to bring it to fruition. This isn't counting the research work Petrazzi did while writing her master's thesis in art history about Alison Knowles, a founding member of the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s and '70s.
As Petrazzi explains, Fluxus sought to bring "a group of artists together and work under a certain name and philosophy of anti-commodification, open, indeterminate pieces that are really open to participation, performance and interpretation." One common medium of Fluxus artists was that of the performance score, essentially instructions directing the reader or participant to perform an action as art.
So while Spatial Poems does not have any works by Fluxus artists within it, it's an excerpt of Mary Lucier's Fluxus performance score Media Sculptures: Maps of Space #1 and #2, published in Womens Work (1975) that serves as the literal and figurative guideposts for Petrazzi's selections of the art in the exhibit and how she wanted audiences to interact with it.
However, to prevent any type of prescriptivist approach to the exhibit, Petrazzi eschewed vinyl lettering that explained Lucier's score, to allow viewers room to explore on their own terms. Same with the interior walls that formerly divided the Flagship space: No walls in the space means the viewer has no externally dictated path and has to create their own.
