OKLAHOMA CITY — If you were ever a child (and let’s face it, who wasn’t?), then the odds are high that you’ve spent some amount of time in a floppy fort or makeshift playhouse built entirely from pillows, blankets, sheets, and furniture.
The blanket fort is not only a time-honored part of the carefree fun of early life, it’s also something of a requisite step in the childhood development of imagination and creativity, the first grasp of how to imagine a wholly new world out of the tools and materials around you.
Now, OKC’s primary purveyors of imaginative repurposing and childlike creativity, Factory Obscura, may have just built the ultimate blanket fort.
The new immersive exhibit PARTY! – running May 24th through September 29th – offers a whole small world covered in fabrics, featuring a massive pillow mound, a trio of transportative hanging blanket portals with micro planes of light and sound inside, and even a whole mini-house full of slumber party mainstays.
Guests can enjoy a private disco, write postcards to no one, call up their favorite boyband hotline, and, of course, compete in the most colorfully immersive game of “the floor is lava” that the world’s ever seen.
It’s all the result of a brand new collaboration between the Factory Obscura team and longtime friends and textile artists Emily Madden and Krista Jo Mustain, the first time that Factory Obscura has selected an outside artist proposal from an open call.
“I’ve been wanting to work with Krista for a long time,” Madden told Free Press during an early preview of the immersive experience. “When we saw that Factory Obscura was doing an open call for artists last year, we decided that we might as well apply, because it’s actually pretty hard for fabric artists to find opportunities.”
Though they both work with fabrics and textiles, Madden is an upholsterer by trade, and Mustain takes a more esoteric approach as a quilter, sculptor, and muralist of textiles.
PARTY! offered them an opportunity to combine the full spectrum of their skills into something that feels at once delicately makeshift and nostalgically patchwork.
“We came up with the idea of making the most epic slumber party and offering it as a space for people to reflect and experience that nostalgia,” Madden said. “I think when you feel nostalgia, you’re really feeling the sadness of things that have passed, and so we want this to really be a happy space, but also a space where people can come to feel that sadness.”
But PARTY! was always intended to be a communal space where guests can work out those emotions together while having fun and remembering what it was like to be a kid, when a living room blanket fort could feel like a full-sized house filled with untethered imagination and infinite possibilities.
“There’s no need to fight it, things are crazy,” said Mustain. “But coming in here feels like giving yourself permission to just be fully in those feelings with everyone else and to be together instead of isolated in our own solo spaces.”
As always with Factory Obscura, the lights, music, sound effects and hidden details run rampant throughout, with the liminal, hanging-blanket “rooms” providing vertical tunnels full of disco, ambience, lights, and even falling hair curlers, everything suspended in a moment and out-of-reach above you, like a memory of being small.
“It’s meant to be everybody’s version of their childhood, not really from one time frame or period,” Mustain said. “Like most people, some of my earliest blanket forts were at my grandma’s house, so we were using blankets and textiles from years before, whatever was available to us, and even the quilts that our grandmother made for us.”
PARTY! actually feels like a perfect companion to Factory Obscura’s permanent Mix-Tape experience, itself a creatively exaggerated and psychologically stylized immersion into the feelings and fleetings of youthful emotion and memory.
But PARTY! arguably takes a few steps even further back in time and in imaginative development to a period of childhood before angst and anger and lovelorn confusion. It’s a time when the biggest concerns were how to build your own pillow-walled house-in-a-house, how to get away with staying up past your bedtime, and how to avoid the floor that just spontaneously turned into molten lava.
“Part of the reason that we put out a call for artists is because we wanted to create an opportunity for artists like Krista and Emily to imagine their work on a larger scale,” said Factory Obscura’s Kelsey Karper, “and then give them the support to make it happen.”
PARTY! at Factory Obscura runs May 24th through September 29th.
For more information, visit factoryobscura.com.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
