Finding Color in the Darkness
Finding Color in the Darkness
Grief, discipline, memory, and the imagined landscape that changed everything.
It starts like this: Tyler James is in college. Basketball, the thing he thought he was, is slipping. The noise of the outside world is muted, but the questions inside his head are louder than ever. If basketball isn’t it—then what is it? If I believe I have a purpose, then what is it?
He doesn’t have answers yet. Just a feeling. A flicker. A love for museums he used to visit with his parents. A memory of music. A possibility that maybe, buried in all the uncertainty, there’s a different self waiting to be uncovered.
This is where McKinley Grove begins. Not as a body of work—but as a void. A psychic clearing where the old identity burns off and something raw is left behind.
“During this time I felt lost, wondering who I was for a lot of days and months,” Tyler says. “Trying to piece together life while going through loss and self-understanding, while trying to graduate college.”
Eventually, he starts making things. He studies other artists. He listens harder to music. He stops asking who he’s supposed to be and starts building who he already is—out of scraps of memory, out of feeling, out of the discipline of showing up. “I like to think of my art like pulling pieces out of my journal,” he says. “No judging, just a flow.”
Years later, now fully immersed in his creative identity, Tyler returned to that foggy season to give it shape. To do what he does best: turn the invisible into color. The result is McKinley Grove, an immersive exhibition and personal reckoning that lives somewhere between grief and bloom.
“These ‘lost’ times felt heavy for me,” he says. “But now I’m able to appreciate those times more and actually pay homage to them through color. Because it gave me answers to who I am.”
If McKinley Grove sounds more like a place than a show, that’s because it is. In Tyler’s mind, it’s a ghost town with promise. Something post-apocalyptic but not hopeless. “Imagine yourself walking through a city like Pripyat, in Ukraine, listening to James Blake’s Overgrown or King Krule’s The Ooz and just getting lost in it,” he says.
Everything is dark and falling apart. It’s not the kind of darkness you escape—it’s the kind you sit inside, until your eyes adjust. “You don’t really have a vision of life and what that means. Then you notice a garden full of flowers underneath the only place where the sun shines. So there’s hope. There’s life you can build on.”
The name came intuitively, as most real things do. “Grove always had this dark essence to it… McKinley was the polar opposite—lighter and full of life. I ran with that mindset and combined the two words.”
McKinley Grove is painted almost entirely in black. But not symbolically—chemically. Tyler creates his own shades by mixing paints and hues to find new gradients within what most people would flatten into a single tone.
“Black and Black is beautiful,” he says. “In a lot of my previous pieces I used different color combinations, but with this one I strictly focused on black—creating different black patterns and concepts with color.”
The discipline of using only one color pushed him into new territory. “I wanted to be more disciplined in my work. If I was going to focus on one color, how would I do it?”
The result is black as language, not absence. A visual vocabulary for emotion, restraint, and self-mastery. “There’s different shades of grief, like there’s different shades of black,” Tyler says. “But it all can feel like the same color.”
“There’s also this part of grief where things feel lighter again. You start to feel colors again and begin a healing process that in time brings peace and balance. That’s how grief lives in this work—the part where you feel color again and keep going.”
Still, McKinley Grove is not just about personal loss. It is also about legacy.
Before the project fully took shape, Tyler lost one of the most pivotal figures in his life: Joshua “Jigg” Phillips, a childhood friend who lived two houses down from his grandparents. “He was the one you probably first played hide and go seek with. The one who put you on Bruce Lee films or Tekken games and music,” Tyler says. “Josh was that for me.”
When Tyler was fifteen, going through a summer that nearly broke him, Josh sold him a black iPod. “It had Bruce Lee films, action films, crazy amounts of music like old Lupe Fiasco, or Wayne tapes. That iPod helped me through a crazy time and reminded me of my love of music and art culture.”
Tyler never got to tell him what that moment meant. So now, he’s telling him through the work.
“I try to create and build and keep that as a reminder as I grow,” he says.
The exhibition itself invites people to step into Tyler’s imagined world. He’ll be painting the final piece live, in real time. Attendees are encouraged to wear black with accents of color—blurring the line between audience and artwork. “If you have people coming to an art show wearing different shades of black with color that visually matches the art pieces on the wall, I think that’s a connection worth seeing.”
McKinley Grove opens August 30 at The Studio Tulsa, with a follow-up afterparty hosted by ASLUT and The Underground Collective at 473. “Good people, good music and vibes,” Tyler says. “It will be a good experience for the people.”