Opening reception February 3, 6-11 p.m.

This exhibition takes on sports and masculinity as its central themes in a collection put together especially for iMOCA by Christopher Bedford, chief curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Images of women—from the goddess Venus to the Virgin Mary—have long been a classic subject in visual arts. In Hard Targets, varied treatments of masculinity get a turn in the spotlight. Hard Targets seeks to revise and complicate our time-honored stereotypes of male athletes and athleticism (as aggressive, heterosexual, hypercompetitive, and remote) by presenting alternative, possibly more democratic, interpretations of subjects frequently revealed to us only in authorized and frankly commercial images. The artists in the show instead investigate sports and masculine identity through topics ranging from biology to business to celebrity, played out in locker rooms, stadiums, and advertising campaigns.

In the videos, photographs, paintings, sculptures, and installations of Hard Targets, you’ll find projects that are funny, irreverent, sexy, incisive, and poignant. Featured artists in the show are: Mark Bradford, Cary Leibowitz, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie,  Joe Sola, Hank Willis Thomas, and Jonas Wood.

In their examinations, you’ll discover how the ways we view and consume sports stars and athletic events are structured by systems of desire and identification more complex (and more fascinating) than most spectators and fans ever realize.

Images:
Hank Willis Thomas
Scarred Chest, 2003
Lambda photograph
60 X 40 inches
Courtsey of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

Joe Sola
Saint Henry Composition
Single Channel Video with sound
Courtsey of the Artist, Blackston, NY, Nye and Brown, Los Angeles

Click here to see images from John Waters appearance and exhibit.

Part of the Spirit & Place Festival
Made possible through a partnership of Big Car and iMOCA.

Shauta Marsh, curator of “Bodies of Waters” asked 17 artists to create original works inspired by the films of John Waters. She selected a mixture of local artists and internationally known pop surrealists for the exhibit.

It wasn’t difficult to garner interest in this project. Most people can connect to a John Waters character. He’s always had his finger on the pulse of humanity, shone a spotlight on its darkness and laced it all with comedy. This is how he became an icon and one of the best-loved filmmakers of our time. Waters truly understands the underdog and the seemingly unloveable.

What makes his messages stick, however, are the fims’ actors and the bodies they inhabit. Waters made drag culture mainstream by giving us Divine. He cast former adult star Traci Lords as well as women like Ricki Lake who battled weight problems. Their personal stories melded perfectly into the roles Waters selected for them. Just as he challenged his actors, he challenges us to consider what a body means and how important it is.

The  artists featured are Elizabeth McGrath, Glenn Barr, Amy Casey, Paul Chatem, Ken Garduno, Lisa Petrucci, Aunia Kahn, Yumiko Kayukwaw, Floyd Jaquay, Shaunna Peterson, Casey Roberts, Mab Graves, Philip Campbell, Kristen Ferrell, Jacqueline Pichardo, Angie Mason, and Danielle de Picciotto .

Films referenced in this exhibit: Cry-Baby, Pink Flamingos, Cecil B. Demented, Polyester, A Dirty Shame and Desperate Living.

Admission is free.

October 1 – November 20, 2010

NEIGHBORHOOD

Click here to see photos from the opening reception.

Neighborhood brought together 6 Los Angeles-based artists who looked at the developed environment as a subject matter of investigation. In this group exhibition, the title “neighborhood” is used loosely, as it refers either to a specific place (sometimes the artist’s own neighborhood) or an abstract location (something that’s been imagined in the artist’s mind, or studied and accessed virally). Different art-making strategies, sometimes overlapping, are employed to create the final pieces. Not limited to one medium,Neighborhood features paintings, drawings and photography; the artists included are Jennifer Celio, Jennifer Lanski, Alia Malley, Nikko Mueller, Shelby Roberts and Devon Tsuno. The group show will run through November 20, 2010.

Jennifer Celio, who primarily works in graphite pencil on watercolor paper and wood panels, offers 5 meticulously rendered drawings that focus on aspects of the city that are often over-looked. With earlier works, Celio’s drawings are directly translated from her photographs of urban environments such as a street corner or the façade of a tract house. Although photography still acts as a starting point, Celio’s more recent drawings have evolved from the literal to the fantastical, now amalgamating selected elements from her collection of images and integrating them to make a single drawing. In Can’t See the Forest (2008), for instance, individual cell phone towers outfitted as fake pine trees from different locations throughout her surrounding neighborhoods are drawn together to create a fictitious forest. Here, the artificiality of our natural environment as well as our quest for it are questioned.

Jennifer Lanski’s American Dream examines the reality or fading possibility of the “American Dream” through the generally understood ideal that hard work can lead to home ownership. Here, the artist looks at this ideal on a national level and presents the viewer with a grid installation of 50 drawings, one drawing for each of the 50 states. Combing through real estate websites of every state, Lanski selects and downloads the image of each house that’s in the same city and zip code as a Target or Wal-Mart. Each drawing—measuring 14-by-12 inches and made of India ink and lightfast colored pencil on BFK Rives paper—depicts a single-family house with text below showing the asking price and the equivalent number of hours at the minimum wage that one would have to work in order to acquire the house in that location and time. By juxtaposing the asking price of a modest, single-family home with the number of hours of labor at minimum wage required to equal that value, the reasonableness of both the current minimum wage and the housing prices in a given area are brought into question. The serial nature of the work also invites comparisons between different geographical locations; the housing versus minimum wage metric can be further examined with respect to the desirability of the given locations.

Alia Malley presents the viewer with 3 archival pigment prints from her Southland series. This project represents Malley’s continued investigation of photography’s role in relation to its documentation of the environment. The artist frequently drives through the streets and along the highways of greater Los Angeles, seeking pockets of unchecked terrain that often reside unnoticed or completely ignored. In fallow sites such as an abandoned inner-city rail line or the grounds of a shuttered fraternity house, Malley attempts to forge a bridge between capturing the sense of place and also its beauty and loss within the environs. Her images exist in the space between the pastoral and the entropic, resembling a Hudson River School or a Dutch landscape painting from afar but with a darker narrative upon closer inspection.

Nikko Mueller works from aerial imagery and architectural plans to engage the developed terrain as abstraction and data. With each selected site, Mueller—primarily using Google Earth and physical maps—creates an acrylic painting that is a translation of such location. His works are meant to critique the templates of social values and desires; the painted pieces are like autopsies, revealing but also questioning the developers’ blueprints of intentions. Channel (2006), a dark painting measuring 38-by-33 inches, depicts an aerial view of a planned city block; the dominant structure on top, resembling a figure with both arms stretched out, is the largest church existing in Orange County, a right-wing, conservative suburb 60 miles outside of Los Angeles. Depicted from the aerial perspective, this alien-like structure and the black color palette throughout the work evoke an ominous quality, dwarfing the neighboring residents.

Shelby Roberts makes photographic works about the ironies and paradoxes of the landscape; his current work is a series of black-and-white photographic panoramas of built environments in the landscape that are failing the ambition that conceived them. Without the use of a tripod, each location is photographed digitally, taking multiple overlapping frames. The final panorama offers a greater sense of place than is possible from a standard frame, linking the built environment to the land beneath it and allowing the gaze to follow the horizon. Parker (2008), an archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper measuring 24-by-48 in., depicts an abandoned drive-in movie theater decaying in the arid landscape; the unused screen has fallen apart, a metaphor for the failure of the American Dream in a town once destined for prosperity. In Pioneertown (2008), a hip and modernist house, famously designed to showcase uninterrupted glass walls and open floor plan, sits amidst the serene desertscape. Outfitted with the most up-to-date amenities, this structure houses the inhabitants in a zoo-like vitrine, where the wildlife on the outside looking in ironically becomes the voyeur.

Devon Tsuno often traverses the LA neighborhoods on his fixed gear bike at night, photographing the contrapuntal elements and strange phenomena within the urban grid. Back at his studio, Tsuno works from such photographs and oftentimes combines them to create source images; and from them, he makes works on paper that obfuscate not only the origin of the locales, but also the line between abstraction and representation. His paintings are made of layers upon layers of spray paint and acrylic paint, using psychedelic colors reminiscent of those existing and seen only at night.  As a whole, his pieces create a non-linear narrative that is defined not by a specific place or time.

Panel discussion with artists Alia Malley, Nikko Mueller, Shelby Roberts and Devon Tsuno:Saturday October 2, 11 a.m. -12:10 p.m.

NUVO gives the show 4 stars.

____________________

August 6-September 18

POSTSECRET: CONFESSIONS ON LIFE, DEATH, AND GOD

Click here to see photos from the opening reception.

The Indianapolis Museum of Contempory Art (iMOCA) will exhibit Frank Warren’s PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God. 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.

____________________

August 6-21

THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF GINGER GAYLORD

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.

____________________

June 4-July 17

EVANS WOOLLEN: THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE

Click here to see photos from the opening reception.

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) will open a photography exhibition focused on the six-decade career of one of Indianapolis’s most accomplished architects.  Evans Woollen: The Art of Architecture will open at 6 p.m. on June 4 in iMOCA’s gallery in the Murphy Art Center.

Woollen is an internationally recognized architect responsible for significant projects around the country.  However, Woollen had the most impact shaping the landscape of his native Indianapolis, with buildings ranging from progressively modern homes to notable local landmarks including Clowes Hall, the Minton-Capehart Federal Building and the recent expansion of the Indianapolis-Marion County Central Library.  The show, curated by Mary Ellen Gadski and iMOCA board members Brandon Judkins (Board President) and Tom Vriesman (Board Secretary), will feature photographs spanning Woollen’s entire career from world-renowned photographers including Balthazar Korab, Ezra Stoller, and Timothy Hursley – as well as the local talent of Wilbur Montgomery, Craig McCormick, and Serge Melki.

“From the beginning, iMOCA’s mission has been centered on connecting contemporary art with everyday life,” Judkins said. “Over the past six decades, Evans has created, and continues to create, work of true artistic expression that touches the daily lives of countless people in our city. By bringing images of his important work together in one space, people will hopefully walk away with a better sense of the impact Evans’s work has made on our daily routines and rituals.”

In addition to his architectural work, Woollen has spent a great deal of time developing his skill as a painter.  A collection of twelve of Woollen’s abstract paintings, many of which are being exhibited for the first time, will be on display upstairs in Mt. Comfort Gallery.

Evans Woollen: The Art of Architecture will run through July 24th with hours Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. The exhibit is part of a series of events that will occur across the city focused on Woollen’s work. The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) will begin the events with a lecture by Woollen on June 3rd at 7 p.m. titled “To Build in Context.” Then, the day after iMOCA’s reception, Indiana Landmarks will offer a tour of six of Woollen’s early homes.  The tour takes place on June 5th and runs from 1 – 6 p.m., with the tour headquarters at Butler University’s Clowes Hall.

About Evans Woollen

Woollen was born into a prominent Indianapolis family whose forbearers first settled here in the 1820′s.  He attended high school at the prestigious Hotchkiss School (Lakeville, Connecticut), and then went on to study architecture at Yale.  After graduating from Yale (1952), Woollen worked in the office of architectural and artistic giant Philip Johnson (Pritzker Prize winner and architect for such projects as the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, Crystal Cathedral, and his seminal “Glass House”). After working for Johnson in Connecticut, Woollen returned to Indianapolis in 1955.  He began his practice in Indianapolis with a flurry of modest, but progressive and modern residential projects.  In 1963, Clowes Hall, designed by Woollen in collaboration with John Johansen, opened and proved to be a breakthrough in his career.  In the decades that followed, Woollen, and his partners at Woollen Molzan & Partners, Inc., developed innovative libraries, churches, government building, and performing arts venues around the country. Woollen has now returned to residential work. His latest project, finished earlier this year, is a complex of three homes on densely wooded land in Carmel.

To read NUVO art critic Dan Grossman’s review, click here.

____________________

Opening Friday, April 2 at 6 p.m.

SEEING IS BECOMING

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 seriesLooking 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

RECORDS

Click here to see photos from the opening reception.

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.

Show curated by Paula Katz.

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.

December 4, 2009- January 16th, 2010

PROJECTED CURIOSITY

Click here to see photos of the opening reception.

After five years at 340 N. Senate Ave. on the west side of Downtown, iMOCA has moved to a newly renovated 2,000-square foot space on the main floor of the Murphy Art Center which has been dubbed the “Temporary Contemporary.”

A pair of Indianapolis-based artists will be the first featured in iMOCA’s Temporary Contemporary  in the Murphy Art Center in Fountain Square when their show of installation and sculpture opens Dec. 4

Jeffrey S. Martin and Brose Partington’s show, Projected Curiosity, runs through January 16th.

Martin’s work focuses on connecting with the audience, finding common ground.

“I am most interested in creating a dialogue with the viewer that is derived from a common experience,” Martin said. “I do not limit my work to any one medium, but rather utilize a variety of traditional and non-traditional media to make this connection.”

He said his goal is to create a form of escapism and suspend time. “A disconnection to the outside world is achieved,” Martin added. “Ultimately, it is an experience that I am creating for the viewer. In doing so, I am attempting to cross barriers between media and expand barriers of what has traditionally been perceived as art.”

Partington’s work focuses on motion and how it effects time, patterns, and the cycles of history. “I have represented my ideas about movement through the use of motors, electronics, and the mechanisms I develop,” he said. “Although the creation of the idea and the mechanism are distinctly different processes, if the work is successful, there is an inevitable and natural reconciliation of the two.”

Recently, Partington’s work has explored the natural world versus mankind’s created world. “This work reflects the inherent conflict of space between humans and nature, and it emphasizes how those elements can interact differently,” he said. “I want to continue to investigate these ideas and create ways to represent them in urban and natural environments, but instead of using motors and electronics I want to incorporate the existent kinetic energy of objects to power my works.”

Micro-interview with Jeffrey S. Martin

Why are you excited about this show?
Most of the opportunities that exist for installations are 1-2 day events and take place in alternative venues. Private galleries need to make sales to survive, therefore it can be counter-productive for a venue to devote it’s space to an experience based medium. Since IMOCA is a museum, it isn’t dependent on sales for financial stability and allows it to showcase a wide variety of exhibits. I’m excited to have the opportunity to exhibit an installation in a formal space for more than just a day or two. This will allow more visitors the chance to experience the piece for the first time or to re-visit it many times.

How will it be challenge?
Installation art inherently follows a different set of rules than object-based medias. Many times, you don’t know exactly how a piece will work until it is set up in the space. Some preliminary work can be done ahead of time, but for the most part, the majority of the work is done in a very short amount of time. This element of working against the clock is very exciting and one of the most challenging aspects of installation art.

How the ideas came to you for the pieces you plan on making for the show and/or the meaning behind the pieces?
Switch (working title) is rooted in childhood wonderment. As I observe my own children interacting with their environment and asking questions about things that I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid. “Why do I have a shadow?” “Why does it follow me?” “Does everybody have one?’ etc… As I re-live this curiosity through my children, I ask myself “How can I recapture a piece of this and share it with others?”  I have chosen to utilize the night light, a universal standard in children’s rooms, to engage the viewer through a common experience. Ultimately the piece is about exploring cause and effect. The goal is to do it in a visually interesting way that recalls the common experiences and wonderment of childhood.

Conditioning p2 (One time I fell and scraped my knee.)
This piece is part two in a series of three installations that explore a journey by dividing it into nine stages. The first piece (Conditioning) explored the first three: Temptation, Trepidation, and Departure. They were presented to the viewer while he/she was riding a slow moving motorized merry-go-round. Because riding a merry-go-round as a child is an experience most people have had, it immediately laid a foundation for accessibility.

Conditioning p2 goes on to explore the stages four through six: Elation, Obstacle, and Frustration. Once again the installation is based upon a specific experience. As we age, many people have to have an MRI for one reason or another. It is this common experience that allows for an immediate connection to the viewer.

Another important element of this series is the sound, specifically the constant droning of the bass and the disclaimer. They were present in p1, again in p2, and will be in p3. They are representative of the constants in our lives whether they be literal, metaphorical, or the ridiculous.

Micro-interview with Brose Partington:

Why are you excited about this show?
I’m excited to show my new body of work in my hometown of Indianapolis, where people have seen me grow and develop as an artist. These new sculptures reflect some of the ideas I’ve learned from my travels and exhibits abroad.

How will it be challenge?
The challenge for me was to utilize everyday machines used in construction or household activities and repurpose them in a new way that reflects cyclical patterns of development, comparable to how a society evolves and changes. I hope that this new creation from an old machine will spark curiosity in my audience, so that they can look at an everyday object and see it a bit differently.

How the ideas came to you for the pieces you plan on making for the show and/or the meaning behind the pieces?
Actually, Indianapolis has factored into the creation of this exhibit, as most of my ideas for this show came from watching the machinery used in the construction and growth of the city.

_________________________

October 9, 2009

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.

_________________________

August 14, 2009

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.

_________________________

May 8, 2009

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.

_________________________

February 6, 2009

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.

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.

____________________

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.

____________________

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.

Designs by Ron Arad

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to announce an exhibition of designs by Ron Arad. Arad is one of todays most creative and versatile furniture artists and designers of our time.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1951, architect and designer Ron Arad studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and at the Architectural Association in London. He was Professor of Design at the Hochschule in Vienna from 1994 to 1997, and is currently head of the Design Products Department at the Royal College of Art In London. Arad has exhibited his sculpture and furniture at major museums and galleries internationally and his work is represented in numerous public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.; Victoria & Alberta Museum, London; and the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, the Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Arts Council of Indianapolis, NUVO, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Fund, IMC, Endangered Species Chocolate, and Christel DeHaan Family Foundation.
Above: Ron Arad: Lo-Void, 2005, Polished Super-inflated aluminum
Courtesy of Barry Friedman Ltd, New York

____________________

September 10 – November 5, 2005

An Exhibition of New Pastels by Tim Gardner

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to announce an exhibition of new pastels by Tim Gardner. Gardner’s new work consists of larger than life-sized pastel portraits based on photographs found in his family’s archive. Known primarily for his watercolors of adolescents striving to become adults, Gardner’s new work continues to investigate identity by looking more closely at his own past.

Gardner, born in Iowa City, IA, now resides and works in Canada. Gardner’s work is charged with elegance and at times humor. Many of these pieces invite us to recall a simpler period of few worries, and in doing so they awaken a familiar feeling of nostalgia. But neither life nor art is ever so simple. Simultaneously confirming and deconstructing reality, his portraits also expose a tension within the viewer that most professional photographers don’t reveal. Gardner’s message: unease. Powerfully, Gardner’s mastery of the mediums he works with increases our uneasiness and in doing so reinforces our intimate connection with his art.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, the Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Arts Council of Indianapolis, NUVO, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Fund, IMC, and Endangered Species Chocolate.
Above: Tim Gardner: Untitled (Family Portrait 1), 2005, Pastel on gessoed paper mounted on canvas.
Courtesy of the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas

____________________

July 23 – September 3, 2005

Hugh & Alethea

A solo exhibition by New York based collaborative artists Hugh and Alethea. In From Indiana, With Love…, the photo tandem continues an ongoing study of rural America. Drawing on the artists’ shared cultural background, this body of work presents beautiful and dispossessed young women, yearning for recognition and displaying their inherent sexuality. Simultaneous with their empty lives is their all too apparent beauty that the artists draw out with care and sensitivity.

Hugh (b. 1978, Dallas, TX) and Alethea (b. 1979, Bloomington, IN) have been collaborating for five years. Having met the first day of college, they have influenced each other’s photographic style from the start. Their rural upbringing reveals itself in their joint style, which exhibits a strong influence of the glossies and the mainstream culture that they portray. This is Hugh & Alethea’s first solo exhibition in the Midwest.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, the Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Arts Council of Indianapolis, NUVO, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Fund, IMC, Endangered Species Chocolate, and Christel DeHaan Family Foundation.
Above: Hugh & Alethea: Bluex Kyack, 2004, C-Print
Courtesy of the artists and Rare Gallery, New York

____________________

May 5 – July 9, 2005

Altered Spaces

Artists’ interpretations of interior and exterior spaces are showcased by site-specific installations and other mediums that renegotiate physical space. Participating artists include Robert Beck, Greg Hull, Jesper Just, Vincent Lamouroux and Sean McFarland.

Robert Beck’s installation literally turns space on its side as he transforms a corner of the gallery. Greg Hull’s installation Night Orchid, a kinetic light sculpture to be placed permanently on the roof of the historic Emelie Building, will alter the cityscape as it will be visible from surrounding neighborhoods as well as respond to altering climatic conditions. Patrons will be able to screen Jesper Just’s film “Bliss and Heaven” in a semi trailer video lounge located in front of the iMOCA galleries. Just’s film follows a young man on his quest to reveal an older man’s secret life and sexuality. Internationally exhibited artistVincent Lamouroux will create a site-specific floor installation in the iMOCA galleries such as has been exhibited in New York, Miami and Paris. The piece will have a spellbinding effect, transforming the perception of our surroundings and encouraging patrons to interact with the environment with renewed self-consciousness. The photographs of Sean McFarland, characterized by a dramatic depth of field, reduce generic cityscapes to the scale of a model train set.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, the Efroymson Fund, Arts Council of Indianapolis, NUVO, and IMC. Installation made possible by Lowes Home Improvement Centers of Indianapolis.
Above: Vincent Lamouroux: Sol, 2005, Wood and wood screws, Site specific installation
Courtesy of the artist and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York

____________________

March 4 – April 15, 2009

Rashid Johnson
A Production of Escapism

Escapism is the tendency to seek distraction and relief from reality, especially through the arts and in fantasy. In this exhibition Johnson explores escapist tendencies in a multi-media project of photos, video, and site-specific installation to reveal reality and often the absurdity of it all.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, the Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and NUVO.
Above: Rashid Johnson: Portrait of My Ex-wife as the Tragic Mulatto, 2004, Lambda print
Courtesy of Moniquemeloche, Chicago

____________________

January 15 – February 26, 2005

Guy Richards Smit
Nausea II

A full-length video project in the cinematic rock opera tradition, is an absurdist journey through crippling doubt, self-discovery, healing, and in the end, unconditional love. The film travels to iMOCA after its debut at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, the Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and NUVO.
Above: Guy Richards Smit: Nausea (II), 2004, Video Stills
Courtesy of Roebling Hall Gallery, New York

CREMASTER CYCLE

For the first time in Indiana, Matthew Barney presents the Cremaster cycle in its entirety.

Matthew Barney (born in 1967) launched the cycle in 1994, with the film Cremaster 4 which was followed by Cremasters 1, 5, and 2. This particularly ambitious project, which the artist has worked on exclusively for eight years, concluded this year with Cremaster 3.

From his earliest artistic performances, the American artist, and former athlete, has tested the limits of his own body. Here he pursues this project by referencing different biological mechanisms, such as the ascending and descending movements controlled by the cremaster muscle, as well as the sexual indeterminacy of the embryo during the six weeks after conception, prior to the formation of reproductive organs. This lack of differentiation opens up a realm of potential that the artist uses as a leitmotif throughout his artistic process.

In the spirit of the romantic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), Matthew Barney’s practice encompasses all media, without any hierarchy. Drawings, photographs and sculptures accompany the films as autonomous material forms. In this way, a multi-dimensional body of work is elaborated through both space and time.

From the beginning, Matthew Barney has shown a preference for malleable materials—petroleum jelly, wax, plastic resin—in a constant oscillation between form and “informe”. This is revealed in the work that opens the exhibition, Partition, a bar covered in frozen petroleum jelly, a form of which appears in Cremaster 3.

Eschewing linear narration and univocal readings, Matthew Barney develops a multi-referential iconography in his films. Each episode takes place in a specific locale—the Isle of Man, the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the city of Budapest. Architecture can also be likened to a character in itself, as in the case with Bronco Stadium or the Chrysler Building.

For each Cremaster installment, identified by its own emblem and color, the artist has been inspired by specific epochs and genres. Thus, in his vision mythology mingles with professional athletics, Hollywood cinema with magic, psychoanalysis with “hard-core” music.

Information courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

ALL CREMASTER PHOTOS © MATTHEW BARNEY, COURTESY BARBARA GLADSTONE. ALL PHOTOS BY Michael James O’Brien except CREMASTER 3 Photos: Chris Winget