Exhibition Statement

I carry with me an inherited history of settler colonialism and religious narratives used to justify violence and dispossession. My ancestors’ roles as militiamen, “Indian fighters,” politicians, and plantation owners shaped my understanding of whiteness and contributed to my lifelong identity as an atheist. During my three-year tenure with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, my understanding of faith, connection, and belonging underwent a profound shift through relationships that challenged my worldview.

While co-curating Beyond the Whitewash in Tulsa, Oklahoma (2022–23), I worked with a multigenerational, racially diverse group of artists and art workers. What began as a professional collaboration became a community grounded in mutual support, accountability, and trust. Through these relationships, I was welcomed into Native and Black cultural and spiritual spaces that reshaped my relationship to faith, history, and belonging. There, I witnessed resilience, collective care, and faith woven into everyday life, opening new questions about the sacred.

In 2023, I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and began work on a new series titled What Is This? Between Fracture and Wonder, an ongoing body of work informed by my experiences in Oklahoma, inherited histories, and today’s political landscape.

The work explores questions of power, belonging, and how we navigate the space between disruption and connection. Rather than resolving tensions between the material and the spiritual, or the contradictions inherent in human experience, the collection holds space for their coexistence. The work invites viewers to consider how we might remain present amid uncertainty, holding grief and curiosity together in a world marked by disruption. 

The collection reveals the slow erosion of civic trust and the residue it leaves behind, while suggesting that something essential continues to endure beyond systems of power and fracture. What is This? is a five-year project culminating on January 20, 2029, centered on a single question: What remains when the foundations of identity, faith, and nationhood are broken open?

I refer to this body of hybrid works as constructs. The term carries layered meanings. On one level, it relates to physical construction, the acts of building, arranging, and layering that shape each piece, where disparate materials are brought together to form new and often unexpected relationships. On another level, the term gestures toward the conceptual: the social constructs, those invented categories and systems that define how we perceive reality. These artworks move between the tangible and intangible, exploring the relationship between external forms and internal states. Through this convergence, the work seeks to draw an undefinable inner source into outer expression, finding coherence not through resolution but by holding together fragments, an invitation toward wholeness amid fracture.

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Soundscape

Brian Stroehlein, composer and sound artist, created the soundscape Praying for Rain to accompany the artworks in this exhibition. Drawing inspiration from the themes, materials, and emotional landscapes of the work, Brian’s ambient compositions extend the exhibition’s exploration of memory, connection, and the space between fracture and wonder.

With more than 25 years of experience in music composition, recording, and sound exploration, Brian approaches sound as an evolving process of discovery. Through collecting, manipulating, and layering sounds, he allows textures and compositions to emerge organically, remaining open to unexpected connections and moments of completion.