Static Bloom
- Art Collective -
August 7 - October 30, 2026
Back Gallery
Our collective practice investigates American culture through material, image, and narrative, using the visual language of popular culture as both subject and strategy. Across ceramics, painting, sculpture, and reclaimed materials, we examine how myth, memory, consumption, and spectacle shape individual and collective identity. Humor—often uneasy, dark, or absurd—functions as a critical tool, allowing us to approach serious cultural questions without moral distance or nostalgia’s softening haze.
We share an interest in material culture as evidence. Everyday objects, surfaces, and forms—vessels, suburban architecture, toys, packaging, debris—become sites where cultural values are encoded, preserved, distorted, or exposed. Our work treats these materials as records of desire, belief, failure, and contradiction, translating the excesses of American life into visual narratives that oscillate between satire and gravity.
While united by content, our approaches diverge in tone and method. One practice embraces ornamentation and graphic storytelling, using ceramics as permanent pictorial documents that fuse folklore, humor, and historical memory. Another interrogates American mythology through theatrical subversion, reframing familiar suburban icons to deflate narratives of exceptionalism and comfort. A third employs reclaimed materials and confrontational assemblage to critique consumerism, environmental collapse, and entrenched power systems with blunt immediacy.
Together, our work reflects a shared skepticism toward idealized narratives and a commitment to making visible the comedies and tragedies embedded in everyday life. We aim to provoke reflection, spark dialogue, and reveal how popular culture—often dismissed as disposable—quietly constructs the myths we live by.
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Stuart Asprey
Artist Statement
Stuart Asprey is a product of an early itinerant childhood. His nomadic upbringing reinforced the idea that no border contains the body or mind. The collective ceramic artwork captures pictorial evidence onto a medium that once fired, becomes a permanent sign of our comedies and tragedies, proof of our faults and proficiencies, a memoire of our treasures and tribulations, and a legend of our struggles and curiosities.
This body of work visually narrates the childhood and adolescence experience of a time before the digital age. It was a life full of riding bikes, using pay phones/call waiting/*69, being able to eat a meal for less than five dollars, when security at the airport meant no smoking, taking public transportation meant going to the bus stop, gathering information was a product of reading books, and (unless you were in a bank) there were no devices that monitored your where-abouts & recorded your daily decision making skills. It was the last bastion of freedom, and I was a loyal soldier.
As a creative product of my environment, I owe an extreme amount of gratitude to the power of observation: seeing things that others choose not to, looking in places that may not always be pleasant, and filling in the blanks in order to see the bigger picture.
Artist Bio
Stuart Asprey is an educator and studio artist and has participated in over 150 national and international exhibitions. He earned his undergraduate degree in studio art and a minor in business administration from Humboldt State University in California and his MFA from the University of Oklahoma. He has lectured and demonstrated at the National Council on the Education for Ceramic Arts conference (NCECA) in Denver and Kansas City, the University of Arkansas, Anderson Ranch Art Center (Colorado), Redstar Studios (KC), the Hardesty Art Center (Tulsa), Midwestern State University (Texas), the Hudgens Center for the Arts in Atlanta, the University of Hawaii and numerous other colleges, universities and art centers across the country. Stuart is currently a Full Professor of Ceramics and the Undergraduate Coordinator in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma.
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Jason Cytacki
Artist Bio
Jason Cytacki is an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Oklahoma. Jason earned MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2011 and now lives and works in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife and two sons. His work examines the underlying framework that mediates the values, meanings and symbols of the world we inhabit. His work has been exhibited both Nationally and Internationally.
Jason has received a number of grants and fellowships to support his research, including the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s Artist Fellowship in 2015, a Presidential International Travel Fellowship in 2015, and a Junior Faculty Fellowship from the University of Oklahoma in 2012. His work is represented in commercial galleries including JRB Art at the Elms in Oklahoma City and is part of the permanent collection of the Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY.
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Robert Dohrmann
Artist Statement
This body of work incorporates found two-dimensional and three-dimensional materials sourced primarily from thrift stores, flea markets, and antique shops. These materials include oversized romantic print paintings, shadow-box clocks, unplayable LP records, and an eclectic assortment of vintage objects. I often describe this process as a form of cultural anthropology, exploring these spaces to collect inexpensive Americana ephemera. I view them as both museums and consumer graveyards, where relics of material culture await rebirth.
When an object sparks my curiosity, I transform it through a process I call “re-arting,” using remix and mash-up strategies to give it new life and meaning. The aged aesthetic of these materials is central to the work. Each carries a veneer of history that reflects American consumer culture and provides a lens through which to examine contemporary social issues.
My work explores critical themes, including: 1. Middle- and upper-class consumerism, 2. Low-cost mass production and planned obsolescence, 3. The social and emotional dynamics of traditional domestic life, 4. Unchecked capitalist greed, 5. Environmental and climate concerns, 6. Patriarchal power structures, 7. The legacies and dilemmas left for future generations, and 8. White American hierarchies.
In January 2026, I began experimenting with ChatGPT out of curiosity. These images grew from a collection of early 1970s romance comics published by Charlton Comics, whose bold colors and heavy black outlines attracted me despite their often toxic portrayals of masculinity. The process involves supplying reference material, generating countless failed images, digitally compositing elements, and spending 20–25 hours refining results before the printed works are extensively reworked by hand. I came to view this approach as an extension of the collage-based practice I have explored since the 1980s, while also providing a distinct visual complement to the rest of my work.
Through these collages, assemblages, and reworked AI-assisted images, I invite viewers to engage with the intersections of nostalgia, critique, transformation, and the cultural forces that shape contemporary American life.
Artist Bio
Robert Dohrmann earned his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in 1992 from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. In 1999, he joined the faculty at The University of Oklahoma, where he initially focused on teaching foundation courses. Over the years, his teaching portfolio has expanded to include a variety of studio and art criticism courses. Currently, his primary teaching responsibilities center on drawing, collage and assemblage, and comics and sequential art.
Dohrmann’s work explores critical themes, including: My work explores critical themes, including: 1. Middle- and upper-class consumerism, 2. Low-cost mass production and planned obsolescence, 3. The social and emotional dynamics of traditional domestic life, 4. Unchecked capitalist greed, 5. Environmental and climate concerns, 6. Patriarchal power structures, 7. The legacies and dilemmas left for future generations, and 8. White American hierarchies.
Through his art, Dohrmann invites viewers to reflect on these pressing issues while engaging with the nostalgia, critique, and transformation present in his assemblages.