By Darla Shelden, Metropolis Sentinel Reporter —
OKLAHOMA CITY – Every year the Oklahoma Visible Arts Coalition (OVAC)presents two Oklahoma Visible Arts Fellowship awards of $5,000 every to particular person Oklahoma artists. Moreover, two Pupil Fellowship Awards of $500 are given to 2 people who attend faculty in Oklahoma.
The Fellowship Awards are given to reward certified artists with excellent imaginative and prescient and are chosen by a visitor curator from purposes submitted by the artists.
OVAC works to assist Oklahoma’s skilled visible artists, and these awards are supposed to acknowledge previous achievements and future promise and can be utilized because the artists’ wants require.
“The Fellowship and Pupil Fellowship Awards honor these artists’ achievements and provide monetary assist for visible artists right here in Oklahoma,” stated Krystle Kaye OVAC’s Government Director. “We’re so happy with these artists and we stay up for the following chapter of their careers.”
The visitor curator for this yr’s Fellowship is Dylan Turk, co-founder and curator of KIN, a artistic consulting firm, and the Particular Initiatives Editor of Structure and Design at Crystal Bridges Museum of Artwork in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Turkworked in a small gallery earlier than serving as a curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork. His imaginative and prescient for the way artwork must be skilled led to many displays, everlasting installations, publications, and nationwide lectures.
“Artists assist us see the place we’ve come from, the wonder and realities of the current, and encourage us for a greater and extra stunning tomorrow,” Turk stated. “These 4 artists are distinctive examples of the folks that make up the good state of Oklahoma.”
The chosen 2023 OVAC Fellows are Jason Cytacki (Norman) and Skip Hill (Tulsa). The Pupil Fellows are Dimana Bazrbashi (Oklahoma Metropolis; The College of Oklahoma) and Claire Dabney (Stillwater; Oklahoma State College).
The funds are unrestricted so the artists might use them nevertheless they like. Along with the funding, the artists and their work can be showcased in profile movies and promoted by OVAC all year long.
Jason Cytacki is an Affiliate Professor of Portray on the College of Oklahoma. Jason earned his MFA from the College of Notre Dame in 2011 and now lives and works in Norman. His work is represented in business galleries together with JRB Artwork on the Elms in Oklahoma Metropolis and is a part of the everlasting assortment of the Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY.
“These work current serene nocturnes of on a regular basis Midwestern scenes,” Cytacki stated. “Dramatic lighting creates a cinematic ambiance, establishing a stage by which the actors appear to have already left. Utilizing particularly mundane imagery, every portray presents a standard expertise, evoking a way of ambiguous however relatable familiarity.
Born in Padre Island, Texas, Skip Hill grew up in Oklahoma Metropolis. After attending Oklahoma Metropolis College, he labored in varied artistic positions in promoting earlier than relocating to Southern California. There Hill produced freelance graphic design work and hung out touring all through Baja, Mexico, Thailand, the Netherlands, Morocco, and Prague. Museums of Europe offered experiences that sparked Hill’s curiosity in creating artwork impressed by aesthetic and conceptual considerations over the business graphics from his years in promoting.
“In a world that always feels out of order, it’s profoundly human to hunt some semblance of management to reshape the world and our expertise of it by no matter technique of creativeness we’ve got,” Hill stated. “Reconfiguring the world utilizing the strategy of collage and blended mediums is on the coronary heart of my artwork follow. The aesthetic of my work is drawn from African American people artwork, African tribal motifs and modern widespread tradition.”
Born in Sliven, Bulgaria and rising up in Oklahoma Cty, OVAC Pupil Fellow Dimana Bazrbashi studied at Oklahoma Metropolis College for 2 years and accomplished her BFA in Studio Artwork on the College of Oklahoma in 2023. Primarily working in paint, Dimana is presently exploring themes of identification and isolation in her artwork.
“Tending to maintain it private, I look to shut family and friends in addition to the setting round me for reference. Persons are a perpetual curiosity that I discover by means of portray,” Dimana said. “Watercolor has been my favourite medium to work with for its translucency and unforgiving nature. By means of self-portraits, I began diving deeper into my very own identification, my Bulgarian roots, and have discovered curiosity in conventional embroidery.”
OVAC Pupil Fellow Claire Dabney, from Stillwater, works in pictures, oil paint, and fiber arts. Dabney’s pictures focuses on feminist iconography, whereas her work confront social points and psychological well being. Dabney is presently ending her closing semester of undergraduate research at Oklahoma State College with a give attention to oil portray. Her work has been showcased in Modella Gallery’s Faces of COVID exhibit, in addition to OVAC’s Momentum exhibition.
“In my most up-to-date work, I attempt to create significant items that everybody can relate to not directly. On this assortment of paintings, viewers will see topics starting from COVID and repressed anger to physique picture and psychological well being,” Dabney stated. “My work titled Mommie Dearest and Midsommar’s Psychosis make use of movie characters to signify emotions which might be too convoluted to easily describe—the frame of mind of an uncontrollable addict, and the psychosis of a lady that has misplaced all the things and is determined to really feel beloved—these psychological challenges are frequent, however not often confronted. My newfound signature in my portray work is my use of embroidery floss.”
For extra details about the OVAC fellows, go to OVACawards.org.
