Shane Brown, Wilderness of Mirrors, 2026, Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photograph by Dan Farnum. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship
Tulsa Artist Fellowship presents Wilderness of Mirrors, a solo exhibition by Shane Brown, marking the culmination of his 2024–2026 Fellowship.
In Wilderness of Mirrors, Brown turns his camera toward landscapes, animals, celestial events, and other encounters across the American West, transforming his photographs through repetition, rotation, and digital composition. Individual images multiply into intricate, kaleidoscopic structures—patterns that evoke mandalas while complicating the distinction between documentation and abstraction.
The exhibition extends Brown’s longstanding investigation of the contemporary West and the ways photography shapes our understanding of place, history, and time. An Oklahoma-born photographer, cinematographer, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Brown has spent more than two decades documenting a region in which inherited histories, cultural mythologies, and present-day life remain inseparable. Earlier bodies of work, including In the Territories, Life Out There, and Great Plains Schema, examine Oklahoma, the Great Plains, and the American West as places continually shaped—and reshaped—by the stories projected onto them.
Here, Brown moves beyond the conventions of the singular photographic frame. A raven in flight becomes a rhythmic field; the silhouette of a pronghorn radiates outward; the phases of an eclipse form an electric circular geometry. Photographs of Tsé Bit' a'i (Rock with Wings, also known as Shiprock), Fajada Butte, Monument Valley, waterfowl, and the supermoon undergo similar transformations. Across the exhibition, recognizable subjects recur until they begin to function simultaneously as image and pattern, observation and construction.
The resulting works foreground a tension that has long animated Brown’s practice: photography’s capacity to record the world and its equal capacity to alter how that world is perceived. Repetition disrupts straightforward representation, stretching a single captured moment into something cyclical and spatial. Landscapes cease to behave as fixed views; animals become constellations of movement; time appears to fold back upon itself.
Wilderness of Mirrors marks the culmination of Brown’s three-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship, bringing his documentary instincts into conversation with an increasingly experimental approach to photographic time, motion, and image-making.
Courtesy of artist and Tulsa Artist Fellow Shane Brown.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shane Brown is a photographer and cinematographer documenting the present-day cultural landscapes of the American West while experimenting with representations of time, motion, and time-based media. Oklahoma-born and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Brown was raised primarily within the Cherokee and Osage Nations and is a 2024–2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee.
Over more than two decades, Brown has worked across documentary, fine-art photography, and cinematography. His photography clients include FX Networks, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and First Americans Museum. He has contributed as cinematographer and director of photography to films by Sterlin Harjo, including Mekko and This May Be the Last Time, and served as set photographer for the critically acclaimed FX series Reservation Dogs from 2020–2023.
Brown’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, First Americans Museum, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, Oklahoma State Art Collection, and Great Plains Art Museum.
Shane Brown. Photograph by Melissa Lukenbaugh. Courtesy of Tulsa Artist Fellowship.