August 2 - September 21, 2024
Natural Rhythms is an exhibition featuring the mixed-media artwork of Tulsa-based artists Nic Annette Miller and Hayley Nichols running from August 1 – September 21, 2024. This exhibition explores ritual, pattern, and movement in our natural and built environments. Through the use of woodcut printmaking, papermaking, ceramics, sculpture, and sound, Nichols and Miller highlight creatures of habit. While focused on different species, both artists document opportunities to take a closer look at our surroundings and explore how we can change our experience by changing the way we pay attention.
Miller’s work focuses on intricate patterns and habits found in nature, often interwoven with personal narratives of heritage, land, and food. Her installations reflect a connection to the environment, which include elements like the flight formations of birds, the migrations of butterflies, delicate pieces of fish, and the hum of bee colonies. By using wood in various stages of her mixed media process, she emphasizes nature as a continuous source of learning and understanding, bridging the interconnectedness between natural patterns and human experiences.
Nichols is drawn to unnoticed and often unintentional marks left by human interactions: the slow wear of a “push” sign on a door, the deterioration of a receipt tray, the shape of a used napkin. These commonplace objects and ephemera capture traces of shared human experience, emphasizing the intimate behaviors that shape collective participation over time. Her practice offers a playful consideration of the beauty and significance found in the ordinary rhythms of life.
Having lived and worked together for nearly a decade, Nichols and Miller continue to collaborate today under the moniker HayNicMil.
Nic Annette Miller is an interdisciplinary printmaker, designer, and teaching artist using multiple mediums to explore multicultural identities and connection to nature. For over a decade Miller’s visual art practice has been based in drawing, woodcut printmaking, watercolor, sculpture, public installations, photography, and video. Her body of work relies on public installations and community engagement and the use of the natural world with materials to bridge a connection to the environment. Additionally, she teaches public art workshops on printmaking and drawing.
Hayley Nichols is an interdisciplinary artist and designer, who recently relocated back to Tulsa, Oklahoma after a 10 year stint in New York. Her art practice experiments with ways of performing careful attention, studying the marks, movements and sounds created by our daily rituals. Through drawing, photography, conceptual intervention, sound, and movement, she facilitates a more subtle noticing of the world. This manifests in a preoccupation with the unintended, such as traces left by unconscious social gestures, slow wear on objects as we use them, the muscle memory of mundane habits.
Artist Talks:
August 8 at 6:00 pm in English with ASL Interpreters
August 29 at 6:00 pm in ASL only