Airports, Art, Aprons – OKC Visit Part 1 of 5

Mid May Frank and I were flying out to Oklahoma City for a week visit with Robin, Jeremy, Autumn and Isaiah. OKC is one of those places that "you can't really get there from here" and so we found ourselves being routed through the Denver Airport on Tuesday May 15th.

If I have to spend time at an airport, I try to make the best of it and look around to take in the oddities or curiosities. Airports are a common place to see artwork. On the ceiling of Terminal C near a grouping of eateries we saw these abstract sculptures and I later learned they were by an artist named Anibel Catalan. I thought they were planes, some sort of morphed version of the old biplanes from the barn stormer era. But I was wrong.

Poking around on the internet, doing an image search of the sculptures, I came across a site called hyperallergic.com which is a "forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art in the world today". I have absolutely no idea why that is the title. The site was the winner of Best Art Blog at the 2011 Art & Reality Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia. Per Hyperallergic

The cluster of sculptures by Catalan, “Vorticity” (2016), is beautifully out of place among the C concourse’s fast food chains. The suspended swarm of yellow, black, and silver geometric mobiles might be abstracted bees, but more likely they’re spaceships or intergalactic settlements forming the spiral of a new galaxy. The artist’s background in architecture is evident in the installation’s industrial forms and its integration with the hectic airport environment.

I guess my ignorance in interpretation about those metal sculptures as morphed biplanes is evident.  But bouncing back from my faux pas, I spied these benches, the shape of which intrigued me. I found no internet information on them so happily I can continue in my musing that I liked them just for their sinusoidal serpentine waviness and not feel I was missing out on the "real" meaning. The bench was pretty comfortable too. Hmmm. Perhaps, form does follow function!

Emerging from the world of artsy culture I found an almost polar opposite offbeat curiosity. Have you ever wondered what is behind those pet relief stations signs? We came across an open door and found out.

Frank went inside to investigate further. He – er – pseudo tried it out for himself. It was quite roomy he commented, but smelled rather bad. I took his word for it while continuing to play the role of photo journalist from afar to avoid the aroma.

After killing some time with this series of quirky diversions, we moved on to the gate for our flight to Oklahoma City. As my previous post reviewing The Woman in Cabin 10 will attest, the book I was reading was pretty bad, so these side detours had looked far more entertaining.

Our flight to OKC was on time and only mildly turbulent as we left Denver. While waiting for luggage at OKC, I perused the artwork along the wall in the baggage area. It was of a Native American theme.

Two pieces particularly caught my eye. This one was titled His Hair Flows Like A River, a woodcut by T.C. Cannon. I wondered whose hair? The man's or the wolf's? Knowing my penchant for polka dots, I attributed their presence in the background as playing a key role in the artwork's appeal to me. Perhaps those dots had a message from the artist that I missed? I could still enjoy them without needing to ferret out a deeper meaning.

The second work of art I liked was called Some Kind of Buckaroo, a serigraph by Jean LaMarr. I was drawn to the color of the sky and to the pattern of the damask fabric "earth" but even more so to the odd textural combination of barbed wire and wire mesh overlaid on the Native American cowboy. Also, seeing the jets juxtaposed with the fluffy chaps seemed like an amusing anachronism.

But I think what really clinched it was that it reminded me of that image of a drive in movie theatre where three modes of transportation are present, a car, a train, and a plane. The 1956 photo is titled Hotshot Eastbound  and the photographer was O. Winston Link. Because of Frank's train enthusiasm I learned that Link was known for his black and white rail photography.

For my own education I looked up woodcut, and the difference between a lithograph and a serigraph. Since a serigraph is a silkscreen process the paint can be felt on the paper surface. In a lithograph the paper is pressed onto a painted flat surface and the ink soaks in flush, not to be felt. Wow. Metal sculpture, wood sculpture, woodcut, serigraph, photograph – I sure do feel artfully enlightened; and all before even picking up our rental car and driving to Robin and Jeremy's to conclude a long day of travel.

Wednesday May 16th, and Thursday May 17th we rested and nested from our travel. I did some food shopping and cooking and we distributed gifts I'd packed. I learned Isaiah loves raspberries.

Autumn pranced and danced around in the child-sized ruffled apron I'd made for her.

Father and son were a handsome duo in the coordinating fireman themed aprons I'd made for them.

The next activity up on our visiting agenda would be a tour of the University of Oklahoma on Friday May 18th led by Jeremy.