Elspeth Schulze and Shane Darwent

Showroom | Showcase was a series of installations by local artists in the Showroom, located at NW 11th and Broadway.

As the construction of the new Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center took place outside the walls, within the Showroom, husband-and-wife duo Shane Darwent and Elspeth Schulze created a sanctuary: a place to contemplate the nature of construction, utilizing the very materials and processes that define it. Using plywood, cinder block, fiberglass insulation, vinyl siding, and blue tarp in clean, formal iterations, they carefully crafted a monument to our collective desire for shelter, stability and progress.

In the exhibition To Build, they created an oasis from and homage to the construction site. Their "garden" included a fountain, a bench, a niche, a sculptural wall work and a vessel. Both the fountain and bench were new, site-specific works, while the niche, sculpture and vessel were existing works.

Elspeth Schulze is a designer and maker exploring material, process and form. Raised in the Cajun culture of Southern Louisiana, her work is grounded in celebration and ceremony. With a background in textiles and ceramics, Elspeth has worked behind the scenes as a pattern maker, production manager and artist assistant. Elspeth holds a BA in Literature from Loyola University, New Orleans, and an AAS in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In the fall, she will head to the mountains to join the MFA program at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Shane Darwent is a studio artist whose interdisciplinary practice fuses architecture, sculpture, painting and photography to explore the poetic potential of the suburban built vernacular. Exhibiting internationally, Shane has been an artist-in-residence at Ragdale, the Ucross Foundation and the Jentel Artist Residency Program, as well as a Core Fellow at Penland School of Crafts. He holds his MFA from the University of Michigan and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Darwent is currently an artist-in-residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.