03/07/2025
OPENING IN ONE WEEK! Positive Space Opens Sydney Smith’s “Desire Permutations” on July 10, Curated by Allison Ward
Centered on contaminated bodies of water in Oklahoma, “Desire Permutations” asks how desire persists when the land has been made toxic. The riverbeds of the artist’s childhood—dammed, diverted, left to dry out—become loci of grief, ecological inheritance, and collective memory. These bodies of water, remade and rebranded into sites of leisure in spite of their toxicity, speak to a longer history of extraction, ecological violence, and capitalist fantasy.
Inflected by a textual history of resistance, the work behaves like sediment—with language that layers, slips, and collapses across screens. “Desire Permutations” refuses clarity, offering instead a poetics of dispersal. Influenced by ecological grief, displaced longing, and the inchoate textures of digital decay, the work offers no stable ground. Only runoff. Only residue.
About the Artist: Sydney Smith “loves long walks on the beach.”
About the Curator: Allison Ward is an artist from Oklahoma whose work encompasses performance, experimental sound, sculpture making, and curation. In addition to being a freelance curator, Allison is the acting Executive Director and co-founder of the non-profit Art House Tulsa, which organizes large scale community art shows and provides opportunities to regional artists.
"Desire Permutations”
by Sydney Smith + curated by Allison Ward
OPENING: 5-8pm, Thursday, July 10, 2025
Through Saturday, July 26
Gallery hours during the exhibit:
TH 6-8pm
FR 5-8pm
SA 12-5pm
+ BY APPT
Contact: Nicole Finley .finley Founder/Director/Curator - Positive Space Tulsa [email protected]
