Phenomenon

On October 9 at 6 p.m., the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) celebrates the opening of its latest exhibition, “Phenomenon,” featuring Indianapolis artists Casey Roberts and Lori Miles. The show includes their interpretations of unexplained phenomenon such as UFOs and Sasquatch and is linked with a series of events featuring internationally known experts on these topics.

The The show runs at iMOCA through November 21, 340 N. Senate Avenue. It is linked with the Big Curiosities series at Central Library that features lectures by internationally known Bigfoot expert Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum and UFO expert Stanton Friedman.

Miles, an assistant professor of art at DePauw University who works in sculpture and installation, has a long-standing interest in exploring the unexplained and the unexplainable. “I love information that can’t be acquired by traditional methods of inquiry — religion, art, and marginalized ideas/ideology like UFOlogy — those things that can’t be proven or verified or studied into existence,” she said.

And Miles isn’t sure if she believes in alien life or not. “I don’t really care, actually. What I know is that I can’t live in a world where everything is known. The types of knowledge I’m in love with can’t be evidenced, they can’t even be seen, but they instead require an intuitive type of belief- the leap of faith — to trust what we know, internally, to be true.”

Likewise, Roberts’s work, which is created through a photochemical process called cyanotype, often illustrates a fantastic landscape and represents nature’s subtle way of dealing with the peculiar aspects in the relationship with mankind.

“A giant glow-in-the-dark heart, or a pile of precious gems tells us that we are loved, just as blood squirting from an oak tree trunk says, all is not well. I am inspired by my conversation with the landscape, I imagine long monologues when pine forests make me laugh and mountains test my patience.”

Miles received her BFA in sculpture from Herron School of Art and Design and MFA in sculpture from University of Notre Dame. Roberts also attended Herron School of Art. He received the Lilly Endowment’s Creative Renewal Fellowship and the Efroymson Contemporary Art Fellowship.

Read about phenomenon on Metromix.com>>

Exhibition made possible through the support of the Arts Council of Indianapolis, GenCon, Hotbed Creative, Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, and 92.3 WTTS.

The Cursed Chateau

Artist/curator Timothy Hutchings has collected a disparate band of contemporary artmakers, including performance artists, digital artists, sculptors, painters, musicians and various in-betweens, all united by a direct or indirect relationship to role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons.  Hutchings has shoved these artists into the unaccustomed role of illustrators for the role playing game  adventure book “The Cursed Chateau”, written by James Maliszewski.

The participating artists include Chris Bors, Olaf Breuning, Jeffrey Brown, Kitty Clark, Alex DeMaria, Don Doe, Giovanni Fenech, Andrew Guenther, Ketta Ioannidou, Josh Jordan, Matt Lock, Fiona Macneil, Chris Patch, Jason Phillips, Owen Rundquist, Rebecca Schiffman, Siebren Versteeg, Todd White, Sherry Wong, Kadar Brock and Steve Zeiser.  Also contributing are the old school game illustrators Pixie Bledsaw and the renowned Erol Otus.

Concurrent with the exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art will be a related booth at GenCon, a yearly gaming convention hosted in Indianapolis.  GenCon is the most important game event in the world, attracting tens of thousands of visitors and acting as a platform for major industry releases and premieres.  This year, GenCon runs August 13 – 16, more information on the convention is available at www.gencon.com.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Arts Council of Indianapolis, GenCon, Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, Hotbed Creative, and 92.3 WTTS.

Hansel and Gretel: Never Eat a House

In the fairytale, a hungry Hansel and Gretel are lured to the witch’s house in hopes of a meal. By contrast, Hansel and Gretel: Never Eat a House from the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) is a feast of irreverent, thought-provoking contemporary art.

The exhibitions are part of collaboration with the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library and the Indianapolis Opera. iMOCA’s portion consists of modern takes on the dark fairytale from the Brothers Grimm–typical of the only Indianapolis museum dedicated to emerging contemporary art.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Christoph Niemann

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September 26 – November 1, 2008

Doppio Songo Dell’ Arte (Art’s Double Dream)

Some of the beautiful artwork in Doppio Sogno Dell’Arte includes delicate engravings by Alberto Burri, explosions of color by Sam Francis and the geometrical dreams of Basaldella. Other artists represented include Enzo Cucchi, Victor Pasmore, Amaldo Pomodoro, Henry Moore, George Segal and Louise Nevelson.

The exhibit’s promotion of an art form without borders, as well as its emphasis on graphic design from the 1970s to the present, dovetails with the mission of iMOCA. It is the only museum in Indianapolis dedicated to showcasing original, groundbreaking contemporary and modern art.

After successful showings in Milan and Chicago, Doppio Sogno Dell’Artearrives in Indianapolis thanks to some Italian help. “I wish to thank Dr. Carlo Romeo, the Italian consul in Detroit, who has been instrumental in generously allowing iMOCA to present Doppio Sogno Dell-Arte,” Nagler said. “My thanks also to Paola Santini for alerting me to this high-quality show and helping us bring it to Indianapolis.”

iMOCA’s goals include stimulating minds and inspiring new discoveries.Doppio Sogno Dell’Arte will inspire viewers to think—perhaps dream—in new ways about graphic art.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Alexander Calder: Presenza Grafica, 1972, etching and aquatint on zinc plate.

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July 22 – September 6

Chakaia Booker: The Making of a Public Art Exhibition

How does a tire become a work of art? Chakaia Booker: The Making of a Public Art Exhibition explores through video and finished sculpture how the artist created her works for her citywide installation Mass Transit. Follow the artist as she creates some of the pieces you can find around downtown Indianapolis in our videos featuring interviews with Booker herself. Meanwhile, the maquettes show different stages of a work before it can be considered finished.

The pedestal and hung pieces serve as a window into the creative mind of Chakaia Booker. While rubber tires appear crude and purely utilitarian at first glance, Booker sees greater potential in the material. She manages to transform the rubber tread into flowing forms that explore transformation, beauty, line, and texture. At the same time, the concept of using tires maintains references to Indianapolis racing and the city’s history.

Chakaia Booker was born in 1953 in Newark, New Jersey and now resides in NYC and Allentown, Pennsylvania. She attended Rutgers University and received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1976 and continued on to The City College of New York for a Masters in Fine Arts in 1993. Booker’s work has been exhibited in the 2001 Whitney Biennial, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. and the Akron Museum of Art in Akron, Ohio among many others. Mass Transit is Booker’s largest outdoor urban exhibition to date.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Chakaia Booker: Black Hole, 2001, rubber tire and wood, 46″ x 50″ x 7.” Copyright Chakaia Booker, courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York.

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April 17, 2008

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t helps us understand ourselves through what we aren’t when the collection of seven video works, ranging from satirical to heartbreaking, opens at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art on April 17th from 5 until 8 pm. Visuals available upon request.

The new exhibition draws its title from the Louis Jordan song Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby. One of its verses reflects the themes of the videos: “A man is a creature/that has always been strange/Just when you’re sure of one/You find that he’s gone and made a change.”

In this vein, the funny, poignant Mustache2 by the Indianapolis based film collective AnC follows a cabinet salesman who barely maintains a façade of optimism while advising a protégé to find his own way. With Dead White Men, Zoë Charlton assumes the poses of famous nudes in art to question her role in art and society as an African-American woman. Transvestites talk about relationships, sex and art world habits in Kalup Linzy’s KKQueens Survey. In Oh, Juliette, Karen Yasinsky uses line–drawing animation to capture the fraught emotional space between a man and a woman.

Other works explore danger—of the streets as well as the sensual. Winter in America by Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Kambui Olujimi, reenacts the true story of a sidewalk robbery and murder with toy figures. Simone Montemurno transforms the threatening into the sensuous by gliding through a pool with a homemade shark fin on her head in Fin. Laura Parnes’ untitled work suggests how we’ve lost touch with our primal survival instinct by juxtaposing images of a blissful family overlooking a peaceful landscape with footage of wildlife stampeding from danger.

Curators for Is You Is or Is You Ain’t are Kristen Anchor and Jed Dodds of Creative Alliance at the Patterson in Baltimore and Christopher West of iMOCA. After its Indianapolis run, the exhibition will open in Baltimore in September and in New York at a time and date to be determined. Special thanks to all of the artists for their participation, Mari Spirito, Jack Shainman Gallery and Taxter & Spengemann.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Simone Montemurno, Fin, 2006-2007, digital video.

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January 18, 2008

Adam Pendleton’s Rendered in Black and Events Are

The Rendered in Black sculptural installation occupying the main gallery space will consist of approximately 100 ten-inch, black-ceramic cubes in an improvised arrangement. Their presentation will play with the ideas of minimalism and performance art.

The Events Are series is made up of an expanding selection of culturally and historically significant images that are silk-screened and presented as small “paintings” with white backgrounds and black detailing. Works on display will include fragmented text from a Scalapino publication, an abstract painting by a student at Black Mountain College and a small Cy Twombly painting.

Artkrush observes that Pendleton’s work often splices together wildly disparate source materials to offer insights on how language and rhetoric shape human experience.

Pendleton has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S., notably at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005); the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005-2006); and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007). Last year he launched Performa 07 in New York with The Revival, which included Pendleton delivering a sermon based on the writings of playwright Larry Kramer and poet Paolo Javier; passionate jazz music; and declarations by poet Jena Osman and artist Liam Gillick.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Adam Pendleton: Rendered in Black. Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

When Contemporary Art Speaks

Artists have been fascinated with words as images since ancient times, but particularly in the 20th century. When Contemporary Art Speaks takes this literal visual language (words and letter forms as subject matter) a step further. Some are witty. Some require a bit of thought. Most question the traditional notions of the viewer purely as a spectator. The exhibition is an exploration of direct communication between the artist and their audience and encompasses a multitude of mediums from vinyl wall installations and drawings to video and interactive art.

Participating Artists

Stephanie Brooks
Harrell Fletcher
Kevin Hamilton
Adam Pendleton
Tomas Schmit
Erwin Wurm

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin and the Efroymson Fund.
Above: Stephanie Brooks: Politeness Strategies #3, Vinyl, 2004
Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

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August 27 – November 6, 2004

Out of Place TWO
Conclusion of a two part series

Place…the landscape in art has been represented by artists through the centuries. From the earliest cave paintings to the impressions of Monet, we have been amazed by what surrounds us every day.

Four artists from different geographical areas throughout the United States take an updated and fresh approach to this most traditional of subjects. Via a multitude of mediums and the utilization of the latest technology, Ken Fandell, Anthony Goicolea, Dwayne Moser and Kari Thomas create their own versions of the contemporary landscape.

Artists

Ken Fandell – photography
Anthony Goicolea – video
Dwayne Moser – mixed media
Kari Thomas – installation

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin and the Efroymson Fund.

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May 15 – July 15, 2004

Out of Place ONE
iMOCA’s opening exhibiton

Place is a subject that has been contemplated by artists over the centuries. A permanent place for the advancement of contemporary art has been something that has been missing from the cultural landscape of Indianapolis, until now. Out of Place One is the first exhibition at the new and first home of the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art at The Emelie Building at 340 N. Senate Avenue.

Out of Place One will include four nationally exhibited artists from different cities using different media to explore that place between who we think we should be and who we are, how we interact with and interpret what we see everyday. Those artists are Craig Doty, Theresa Gooby, Nikcy Hoberman, and Lee Walton.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin and the Efroymson Fund. 

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January 23 – February 21, 2004

Earth, Air, Fire & Water
The Four Elements by four artist

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) and Herron Gallery will collaborate to present this exhibit of site-specific art. All of the participating artists (Charles Gick, Jeremy Tubbs, Bill Viola and Patrick Zentz) will present unique experience-based installations for the Herron Gallery.

Herron Gallery, Herron School of Art / IUPUI
1701 North Pennsylvania Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202
(317) 920-2420

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin.