OKLAHOMA CITY, OK.- The Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) announced today its spring 2027 exhibition, Elemental Visions: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and the Moving Image, which will open to the public on Saturday, February 27.
Organized by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in collaboration with the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, the exhibition will feature a number of works on loan from the Foundation. Drawing on ideas from classical film theory and ancient philosophy, this exhibition explores how artists and filmmakers have used fire, water, earth, and air to reveal the expressive possibilities of moving-image and light-based art across more than a century. Elemental Visions is structured in four visually and thematically distinct sections:
Fire: Illumination, Transformation, Spectacle
Water: Immersion, Duration, Flow
Earth: Landscape, Labor, Materiality
Air: Atmosphere, Altitude, Algorithm
This immersive exhibition will bring historic and contemporary works into conversation, said exhibition curator and Director of Film Programming Lisa Broad, PhD. OKCMOA is uniquely positioned to present Elemental Visions, and were committed to offering visitors a fresh perspective on both the history of film and the possibilities of moving-image art today.
Visitors will encounter works by early cinema pioneers, alongside those by groundbreaking contemporary film and video artists such as Judy Chicago, Bill Viola, Miguel ngel Ros, and others. Exhibition visitors will also recognize pop culture iconography in Cory Arcangels Super Mario Clouds and will experience recent digital art, such as DRIFTs Coded Nature 1.3-3, that responds to visitor movement. The featured works range from short films lasting only a few minutes to endlessly generating digital installations.
Additional programming and details about the exhibition will be announced in the coming months.