The Indianapolis Museum of Contempory Art (iMOCA) will exhibit Frank Warren’s PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God, August 6 through September 18. The opening reception is August 6, 6-11 p.m. at iMOCA, located inside the Murphy Art Center in Fountain Square.  It will feature the original postcards Warren received during a community art project where people anonymously mail in their secrets.

The senders created a handmade piece of artwork on one side with the secret which ranged anywhere from,” I send birthday cakes to people on Death Row.”  to “I jerk off to other people’s Facebook photos.” Warren posts the images and confessions every Sunday on his website: www.postsecret.com.

“This project has shown me that art can be like a new tongue that allows us to speak and pray in ways that might otherwise be impossible,” says Warren. “And if we listen, we may come to understand that we are always on our spiritual journey—even when we feel most lost.”

The website receives more than 6,000,000 visitors per month. The popularity of the website led to several books of the postcards being published, all of which made the New York Times bestseller list. Most recently the book “PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God” (the namesake of the art exhibition) released in October 2009 hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Warren’s PostSecret project is also credited to “moving the cause of mental health forward” by the National Mental Health Association and raised over $200,000 for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

iMOCA is open Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. and closed on holidays. Admission is free and made possible by The Efroymson Family Foundation, The Murphy Art Center, The Haddad Family Foundation, and The Nicholas H Noyes Jr. Memorial Foundation.

The exhibition was organized International Arts &Artists, Washington, D.C. in cooperation with Frank Warren.

The Private Collection of Ginger Gaylord will bring to Indianapolis three of today’s top illustration based “pop surrealist” artists, Ken Garduno, Angie Mason, and Christopher Umana.

The show will take place in the Mt. Comfort Gallery.

Ginger Gaylord is one of the pseudonyms a Chicago-based art collector uses when she purchases a piece of art. Gaylord prefers to use a pseudonym because she desires to keep the contents to her collection private. As she frequently says, “If people don’t know who you are or what you have, people won’t want to steal it.”

When offered to curate a show, Shauta Marsh contacted Gaylord looking for artists with an illustration base. “I find pop surrealism and lowbrow art  very appealing,” says Marsh. “It is accessible and has its fingers on the pulse of western pop culture. When art borrows from pop culture and combines it with illustration, it appeals to us the way cartoons and/or picture books did when we were children. But these artists create work that reflects what we’ve learned as adults and the problems of society, pair this with familiar images from our youth. Collectors are buying these pieces and we are beginning to see more of this kind of work in museums.”

The artists in this show are a few of the most recent artists Gaylord has collected with an illustration focus. iMOCA is pleased to offer Indianapolis patrons the opportunity to own the work of these artists.

About Ken Garduno: Ken Garduno graduated with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California with a Bachelors of Arts degree in illustration.  Since graduation, he has been working in Los Angeles as a freelance illustrator/fine artist.  Ken’s work has been shown in numerous galleries internationally, and has done illustrations for various clients.  Some of these past clients include: The Penguin Group, LA Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Clandestine Industries, Pacific Sunwear, as well as design for the bands Fall Out Boy and As Tall As Lions.

About Angie Mason: Angie Mason grew up all over Northern New Jersey and spent time in Puerto Rico living on her grandfathers farm and also lived in Florida during her formative years. A chaotic disjointed upbringing helped form her visual imagination and sensibilities at an early age. She attended Parsons School of Design where she lived in New York City for a brief period. While at Parsons, she studied in both the fine arts and illustration departments.

Mason has been creating her inner world since a very young age developing the characters and telling the story of her life through paintings, drawings and sculpture. Exploring the twisted combination of opposites through the creation of slightly off characters using them as a way to paint truths about being human. Mason’s works are both horrific and humorous, yet speaks of what it means to be human. Her works are a visual examination and narrative of life in modern times as seen through her menagerie of creatures which act as mirrors for us when looking directly at ourselves is too frightening to do, giving us a glimpse of reality through a grotesque folk pop lens.

Angie Mason exhibits her work extensively throughout the United States as well as exhibiting her work internationally. Her grotesque folk pop sensibility has put her in the center of the new contemporary movement having her work collected and shown all over the world in such places at France, Germany, Japan, London, New York City and Los Angeles. She currently resides and works out of her home in Northern New Jersey, a spooky old colonial house that she shares with her husband and very bad kitty.

About Christopher Umana: Christopher Umana is an illustrator and native of Southern California who now resides in Northern Nevada.  He earned his BFA in Illustration from the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California.  His work depicts everyday occurrences from the monumental to the mundane.  Every moment in one’s life is a piece of a puzzle that should always call attention to itself regardless of its importance or impact.  Everything we do has relevance and an effect on ourselves and those around us.  Umana uses anthropomorphic figures as representations of the people he encounters everyday. He believes there is a connection between people, animals, and insects. He also uses flora and fauna in his work to represent the personality traits of people and how they react and adapt to their lives and surroundings.”  His recent work focuses on personal topics such as family life and death in correlation with different cultural reactions and superstitions related to these subjects.

Umana has shown extensively across the United States and is in private collections worldwide with various shows scheduled at home and in Europe for next year.  He has also done editorial and commercial illustration, most recently an album cover for the pioneer of breakcore music worldwide, Venetian Snares.  He draws inspiration from the importance of drawing, and the emotional impact you can create through expressions.  This is why Umana’s characters have a tightly “drawn” quality on top of the loose paint.  This is his homage to the comic artists who influenced him growing up.  It is also a tribute to the expressive and raw style he remembers from preschool finger painting.

Seeing is Becoming brings together six artists who create objects that might be described as potential portraits. These works play with the ambiguity inherent in all images and treat visual perception as an interpretive act involving both memory and imagination.

The artists in Seeing is Becoming propose a conception of portraiture in which artist, subject and viewer occupy symmetrical, equal and interchangeable positions. They resist easy, fixed notions of identity and point to potential new ways of seeing and being.

The work in Seeing is Becoming does not aim at a single, correct interpretation, but rather examines the artist’s attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. In the series Looking at Art, The Reception, Shizu Saldamando slyly reverses the position of the viewer and the subject. The subjects, the artist’s friends attending a gallery opening, are drawn in ballpoint pen on canvas. They gaze out expectantly, placing the viewer in the unusual position of the artwork. Louis Bickett’s carefully archived objects appear to be the collected personal effects of a presumably fictitious ‘Daddy.’ The objects and their labels suggest a complex and often contradictory narrative around their absent owner.

These artists introduce ideas, and to a certain degree they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. These gaps are openings, allowing us as viewers to become co-conspirators with the artists.

The work in Seeing is Becoming does not aim at a single, correct interpretation, but rather examines the artist’s attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. These artists introduce ideas, and to a certain degree they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. These gaps are openings, allowing us as viewers to become co-conspirators with the artists.

Artists: Louis Bickett (Lexington, KY), Julie Orser (Los Angeles, CA), Letitia Quesenberry, (Louisville, KY) Chris Radtke (Louisville, KY) , Shizu Saldamando, (Los Angeles, CA) and Dmitry Strakovsky (Lexington, KY).

The show will run through May 15.

February 5-March 20, 2010

Opening: February 5 from 6-11 pm

Athens, Georgia-based artist Kathryn Refi creates unique visual documentation of her daily experiences by dissecting her ritually performed actions and reconfiguring them into often-abstracted records. The presentation of her work mainly utilizes the media of painting and drawing, though Refi often uses technology to capture her initial information. Creating works that are exquisitely rendered and striking, these “products” of her actions are very much contingent on the process Refi defines to capture her data. Records, which presents several bodies of work including: “All Things Considered”, “Color Recordings” and “My Address Book”, is the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date.

In her most recent body of work, All Things Considered, Refi created large drawings based upon the information she received from listing to National Public Radio’s (NPR) program of the same title during 2007. During each one hour episode, which covers global news, Refi noted all the geographical locations that were mentioned in each segment. Using small adhesive dots Refi then created her own global maps on paper with a marker for each mention of a particular location. Without adding in country boundaries a map of the world emerges. These maps beg the viewer to ask “Are all things really considered” as one can see the areas of the globe that are covered by this global news radio program.

Refi’s painting Color Recordings detail the dominant colors that she saw in her daily life during a one week period. Wearing a surveillance camera embedded in a hat for a week, the footage was then put into a customized computer program which organized the video recording into 729 distinct hues. Refi then established a minimum amount of color for inclusion in the paintings (.125 percent/day) and calculated how much of each color to paint. The resulting “abstract” works truly take on a different presence when the method of their creation is known.

The My Address Book series offers striking portraits of the important locations in Refi’s life: the addresses of her friends and relatives through the perspective of the satellite.  Exploiting technology for her initial images, Refi hand-painted the 43 locations in the series. The works remind the viewer that our understanding of location, and how to determine geographic place, is now often completely dependent on technology.

Frequently using technology to capture data which is the basis for her works, Kathryn Refi finds a way to put handcraft into all her creations, fashioning items that are as visually intriguing as they are thought-provoking. Realized with an autobiographical vision, these sophisticated records are a glimpse of our own everyday life, resonating with personal significance for all of us.

Kathryn Refi has exhibited her work nationally including solo and group exhibitions at the Fugitive Art Center, Nashville Tennessee; Solomon Projects, Atlanta, Georgia; Mixed Greens, New York City; The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia; Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Refi received her MFA in 2002 from the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia where she currently resides. She received her BFA from the Maryland College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland in 1997.

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.

Jen Davis: New Photographs

Body-image issues, self perception and attraction are explored in New Photographs by Jen Davis, the subject of a solo show at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) May 8 through July 25. Images available upon request. Davis’ self-portraits evaluate her self-image as an overweight female in her late 20s dealing with the pressures and expectations of the outside world, while her photographs of men create an intimacy with her subjects that she yearns for and does not have emotionally or physically. Her work has been described as ranging from sensuality full of rich colors to a tense scrutiny of her isolation.

In her self-portraits, “I deal with my insecurities about my body image and the direct correlation between self-perception and the way one is perceived by others,” said Davis, an Akron native who received her MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art in 2008. With her photographs of men, “I am interested in investigating the male gaze not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a personal and sexual exchange,” she said. “Every frame is a record of a hypothetical and fictional relationship that formed between us … a visual record of not what actually took place, but what I imagined it to be.”

Davis is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award, a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant through The Department of Cultural Affairs, and two Albert P. Weisman Memorial Scholarships.

In 2005 Davis had two solo exhibitions: “Jen Davis: Recent Photographs at ” Texas Woman’s University Fine Arts Gallery, Denton; and “Self-Image,” Photo Passage at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada.   In 2008 her work was included in exhibitions at major museums and collections in the US—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Bank of America LaSalle Collection, Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; and Yale University School of Art.  Additional permanent collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

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.

Das my i$H

The color for a 25^th anniversary is silver… but expect swirls and explosions of bright shades at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art when “Ish” celebrates 25 years as an abstract graffiti artist.

For Das my i$H, which opens Feb. 6 and runs through April, the artist (Ismael Muhammed Nieves) will transform the iMOCA galleries into his “crib.” This unofficial retrospective features such paintings as  “Babylon Gone #5″ and “Clap Your Hands”, along with several installations and even a sculpture of a chair with wild, flowing lines.

The exhibition of paintings and sculpture is sure to recharge the soul during the grey, dreary Indiana winter.

“My art is a lot of line work—shapes, images and moments formed by loose lines,” Ish said. “For me, drawing a line is equivalent to performing prayer. There has to be a trust that what you’re thinking and/or what you’re engaging in will manifest itself close to your intention.”

As befitting a Purdue graduate with a degree in electrical engineering, Das my i$H is sectioned into parts, all working together in a closed circuit.

Das my i$H is part of a partnership with the Indianapolis Public Schools, which features Ish and seven other artists on an interactive DVD to be used by more than 20,000 schoolchildren.

Ish became exposed to street art while growing up on the lower East Side of Manhattan. The work of this self-taught artist has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Indiana University Gallery for Contemporary Art, South Shore Arts in Munster, Purdue University Calumet and the CISA Gallery, among others. He has been part of group exhibitions at the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute and South Shore Arts.

Exhibition 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.

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.

New Work by Jeff Gabel

Gabel specializes in scribbly, small-scale pencil drawings of people or faces, possibly imaginary, with a line of text explaining who they are or what they were thinking at the time they were observed. Gabel’s empathetic exploration of the contemporary American landscape finds moments in the everyday that transcend the banal.

The iMOCA show will include a large graphite and charcoal drawing which Gabel will create directly on the museum’s walls; a number of graphite drawings on gesso board; and a video piece, an illustrated audio-visual adaptation of Thomas Mann’s short story “Gladius Dei,” rendered from the original German into “a grammatically impoverished (yet profanity-rich) contemporary vernacular.”

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.

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July 13 – September 1, 2007

XANADU

Armageddon is set to a disco beat in Robert Boyd’s four-part video installation Xanadu, which kicks off the grand re-opening of iMOCA. Boyd, a New York-based artist, used rapid editing to combine images from vintage documentary films, TV and Internet clips, and cartoons into a history of apocalyptic thought–presented as a series of MTV-style music videos in a disco-like setting.

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.

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February 3 – March 24, 2007

Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellows

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) is proud to exhibit artworks by ten talented local contemporary artists, all of whom have been awarded $20,000 grants from the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship program over the past two years. Since 2004, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, which is managed by the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF), has recognized some of the city’s most gifted contemporary artists. A reception for the artists will take place Friday, February 2, 2007, from 6:00 – 9:00 pm at iMOCA. The exhibition will continue through March 24, 2007.

In 2004, Fellowships were awarded to Indianapolis artists Gregory Hull, Linda Adele Goodine, Eric Nordgulen, Marc Jacobson, and David Russick. 2005 Fellows include Katrin Asbury, Stuart Hyatt, Emily W. Kennerk, Brian Myers, and Jamie Pawlus.

This award is unique because it is available to almost any central Indiana artist with very few restrictions. While the artists must be 25 or older and work in photography, painting, sculpture, new media or installation art, those applying for the award are not required to have a degree or a minimum amount of experience. Efroymson Fellows can use the money any way they choose — for living expenses, equipments and supplies, studio rental, travel essential to artistic research, or to complete work.

“The Efroymson Fellowships are intended to get funds directly to individual creative people in our city,” said Jeremy Efroymson, vice chair and one of three Efroymson Fund advisors. “By supporting creativity we can make Indianapolis a vibrant cultural center, a place where creative people choose to live.”

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and Jim and Meg Irsay.
Above: Stuart Hyatt: Shrimp Attack. Courtesy of the artist.