Friday, December 13 2024 through Friday, February 14, 2025
Pictured: Peek, 16 Fingers by Melissa Cooke Benson
Opening Reception: 6-9 p.m. Friday, December 13
Artist Talks and Musical Performances: 6 p.m. Thursday, February 13
Closing Reception: 6-9 p.m. Friday, February 14
A collaborative exhibit from artists Melissa Cooke Benson, Jason Cytacki, Michael Elizondo Jr., Haley Prestifilippo, Erin Shaw, and Sohail Shehada. Curated by Cedar Marie, Drawing on Narratives explores the various ways artists tell stories through visual imagery, metaphor, and the drawing process. Individual artists in the exhibition “draw” from a range of themes and processes to comment on larger popular culture. Artworks include large scale powder graphite drawings, pastel portraiture, small works, drawing installations, and paintings that are simulacrum for drawing, assemblage, and nostalgia.
More about the artists:
Melissa Cooke-Benson
Curiosity compels Cooke-Benson to create new worlds to escape from current realities. Between a global pandemic, social injustice, isolation, and mounting stress and anxiety, drawing has become a respite. Many of her drawings reflect on the experience of being separated from loved ones and quarantined inside our homes. Longing, isolation, uncertainty, and coping has come with these experiences. In a time when life is hectic, yet somehow simultaneously meandering and repetitive, Cooke-Benson’s drawings make a conscious effort to process and reflect on her surroundings.
Jason Cytacki
Jason Cytacki is a painter who uses assemblage & sculpture to explore drawing & painting narratives. His work examines the underlying frameworks that mediate the values, meanings, and symbols of the world we inhabit. He often employs humor to create a sense of artificially constructed reality and life-size physical iterations of the models created for his paintings that are based on personal childhood experiences. Inspiration for his artworks include toys and stories recreated from childhood memories. Cytacki earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2011 and lives and works in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife and two sons. He is an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Oklahoma.
Erin Shaw
Erin Shaw is a painter and visual storyteller. The child of an Oklahoma farmer, Shaw tills the rich soil of dichotomy through her masterful uses of color, iconography, and story. As a Chickasaw Choctaw artist, she creates in a state of tension, suspended between two worlds where both solemnity and humor pervade her art. She finds that truths are revealed in unanticipated ways, and trickster often appears throughout her work. Shaw earned her MFA from the University of Oklahoma. She is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, AR.
Michael Elizondo Jr.
Michael Elizondo Jr. merges Indigenous influences and narratives from his life to reflect on the evolving states that symbolize our current time, history, and larger cultural experiences. His drawings and painting explore the aesthetics and meanings within ancient and contemporary design. Elizondo earned an MFA in painting from the University of Oklahoma in 2011. He went on to teach at various higher education institutions and was Director of Bacone College’s storied School of Indian Art from 2020-2022.
Haley Prestifilipo
Families often pass down mundane objects alongside valuables as heirlooms, imbuing these items with a sense of power and value. Over time, they become enchanted artifacts, deeply embedded into individual or familial identity. Prestifilippo has her own collection of magical trash: tree bark from her grandfather’s tree farm, a Ziploc bag of fur from a childhood pet, a crumbled rose saved from a bouquet she was given after the birth of her first child. Without knowing the history of these objects, they might appear meaningless to others, but for her they are a tangible bridge to a specific person, place, or event. Her drawings assemble and interpret some of the objects she has saved throughout her life so far, and by extension the people and moments they embody. Many of the drawings are partially erased, unformed, or unfinished. Some of the pieces are woven with hair she lost and subsequently saved after the birth of her second child, further activating the drawings as mementos themselves. Viewed as a group, these pieces begin to form a specific but incomplete narrative, while their objective randomness reflects the quilted nature of experience. Prestifilippo earned her MA in studio art in 2010 from Eastern Illinois University. She teaches drawing at the University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts.
Sohail Shehada
Sohail Shehada’s portraits grant us the ability to see beyond human exterior appearances by highlighting the subtle qualities that make each person unique. The complexity of the human face and the expressions that facial features are capable of revealing to the outside world have been of great fascination to this artist. The models he uses for his portraits are individuals that he knows, and regardless of the topic, the choices he makes in the compositions are based on communicating with the individual more than what simply lies on the surface. Shehada is also a master figurative sculptor with multiple large scale works in public spaces and in private commissions throughout the nation. He holds an MFA in ceramics and a BFA in studio art from the University of Oklahoma, and a BA in architecture from Oklahoma State University. He teaches figurative sculpture and drawing at the University of Oklahoma School of Art.