Conceived and organized by OKCMOA in close partnership with the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, this original exhibition brings together film, video, digital art, light art, and other moving-image media spanning more than a century, united by their engagement with the four classical elements: fire, water, earth, and air. Presented in four thematic sections, Elemental Visions: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and the Moving Image features immersive and sensorially rich works by such artists as Bill Viola, Judy Chicago, Jennifer Steinkamp, Dan Flavin, Cory Arcangel, Ragnar Kjartansson, Bruce Nauman, Allison Janae Hamilton, and many more.
Drawing on ideas from ancient philosophy and classical film theory alike, Elemental Visions moves through four visually and acoustically distinct spaces that each explore different aspects of moving-image art. In Fire, visitors will encounter works that foreground the themes of illumination, transformation, and spectacle, from burning houses to plumes of colored smoke. In Water, immersion, duration, and flow are highlighted as viewers witness crashing waves and look below the water’s surface. In Earth, landscape, labor, and materiality make the presence and texture of the natural world felt, while in Air, atmosphere, altitude, and algorithm offer a lighter, more weightless experience.
Intuitively organized, accessible for visitors of all ages, and engaged with the moving image’s more than one-hundred-year history, Elemental Visions also includes the work of film’s earliest pioneers, such as Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and Georges Méliès, showing how artists and filmmakers have returned to the four elements as a means of exploring the unique possibilities of moving-image art since the invention of cinema in the late 1800s.
By bringing together works from across the history of moving-image art, Elemental Visions invites visitors to look more closely at the natural world and at the extraordinary ways artists have transformed its most fundamental forces into cinematic experience.
Elemental Visions: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and the Moving Image will be exhibited exclusively in the third-floor special exhibition galleries of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
—
Image Credits:
Ragnar Kjartansson, Burning House (still), 2015, single-channel video (color, sound), 92 minutes, Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, © 2026 Ragnar Kjartansson. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
ABOUT THE CARL & MARILYNN THOMA FOUNDATION
The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation was founded to enhance lives and communities through access to the arts and education. The Foundation makes art collection-related grants to institutions and individuals and lends and exhibits its collection to museums and galleries worldwide. The public can also experience works from the Foundation’s collection firsthand at its Dallas headquarters and exhibition space, as well as at Thoma Collection, its public art space in Santa Fe. For more information, visit thomafoundation.org.
