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

December 2, 2011-January 14, 2012

Click here to see images from the opening reception

iMOCA will host the exhibition, Fast Forward featuring the current work of past Efroymson Contemporary Arts fellows: Linda Adele Goodine, Emily Kennerk, Arthur Liou, Anthony Luensman, Brose Partington, Jamie Pawlus, Melissa Pokorny, Jennifer Reeder, Tyson Skross, and Tom Torluemke.

It was a difficult but exciting task for curator Paula Katz. “Ultimately, it was a balance of selecting at least one recipient from each cohort of awardees and artists we may not have seen on display recently in Indianapolis or in gallery settings,” said Katz.

Now in its 7th year, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowships were established to increase public awareness of contemporary art.  The intent of the fellowship is to reward creativity and encourage emerging and established individual artists by supporting their artistic development.  Since 2004, $700,000 has been awarded to 35 individual contemporary artists in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio.  The Efroymson Fellowships are made possible with support from the Efroymson Family Fund, a fund of Central Indiana Community Foundation.

The 2011 fellowship recipients will be listed at the opening reception after being announced on December 1.

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.

Columbian artist Alberto Baraya and Herron School of Art and Design professor Danielle Riede are bringing Expedition Bogotá-Indianapolis to iMOCA, 1043 Virginia Avenue, Indianapolis, IN on October 7. Expedition Bogotá-Indianapolis is a collaborative exhibition that explores the migration of peoples, ideas and products. Riede met Baraya outside of a trinket shop in Venice in 2009. Baraya was looking for glass flowers to put in an installation he was making for the Latin American Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial.  In their conversation, they realized that both collected materials and then organized them into installations as part of their art practice.

In 2010, Riede received an IUPUI Arts and Humanities internal grant to work with Baraya on the exhibition and the two started collaborating through e-mail and then in person when Baraya came to Indianapolis to work with Riede. The exhibit will run through November 19. The museum is open Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. An opening night reception will be held Friday, October 7, 6-11 p.m.

Baraya is fascinated by the history of European colonialism in the Americas and its ramifications today. He uses eighteenth century scientific methods to call Western authority and domination into question. For Expedition Bogotá-Indianapolis, Riede and Baraya are making a taxonomical inventory of artificial plants they found on walks and in second-hand stores, and others which were donated to the project. The project is very much an extension of Baraya’s expedition series in South America. Much of the collection of fake flora will be presented at iMOCA as if it were in a natural history museum.

Additionally, Baraya will introduce some of the artificial plant life to new locations in Indiana and the pair will photograph this process, pointing to the idea that any traveler can also have an influence on the landscape and how he or she chooses to document it.  As an extension of Riede’s typical working methods, she is dissecting some of the fake plants and reorganizing them to make new enigmatic forms. “I have been thinking about the human manipulation of landscape and story telling while making these forms,” says Riede. Her interests in this project include raising awareness of the history of the development of the Americas and the state of Indiana, encouraging dialog about responsible development and protecting our natural resources and parks, and bringing international perspective and art talent to Indianapolis.

“In the 1600s, Indiana was lush. Approximately 85% of it was covered with dense forests of giant hardwoods and the Kanawakee Marsh spotted the state with nearly two million acres of wetlands,” says Riede.In the end the project is also a catalog of kitschy fake flowers and plants.

“I have to admit, that I think a lot of them are beautiful and quite convincing replicas of the real plants they substitute.”

All our exhibitions are made possible through the support of The Efroymson Family Fund, the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, Penrod Foundation, and HotBed Creative.

Danielle Riede is a mother, an artist and a teacher. She has been an Assistant Professor at Herron School of Art and Design – IUPUI since the fall of 2008. After completing her Bachelor Degree in Art and Art History at the University of Virginia, she lived in Italy for four years as an au pair and then an editor and translator for a film company translating films into 32 different languages for major Hollywood Film Houses and the Venice and Turin Film Festivals.  While working for this company, she also attended the figure drawing school at the Accedemia di Belle Arti di Firenze.  In 2003, she began studying with Daniel Buren at The Art Academy of Düsseldorf in Germany, as well as with Richard Roth and Mark Harris at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2005, she earned a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. Riede has exhibited extensively at museums and galleries in Germany, France, Greece, Mexico and the United States. Some of the venues include the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece and Stux Gallery in New York.

Alberto Baraya (Colombia) has worked on Herbarium of Artificial Plants for a long time; it is a work in progress which reformulates the scientific journeys of the XVIII and XIX centuries. At the 53rd Venice Biennale, Baraya recreated an Expedition to Venice.

Click here to see images from the opening.

Brian James Priest’s exhibit Animalcules centers on human beings as both collectors and collections, the exhibit will feature large-scale prints, sound and floor installations, and live performance art.

Priest’s exhibition takes its name from Anton van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope and discoverer of microorganisms. Leeuwenhoek looked at an ordinary drop of pond water and discovered the beauty and monstrous face of the microscopic world. He “found Eden in every drop of water”, so the world instantly became more dense, more wonderful, and more terrifying.

“We are a collection of experience as well as ecology. I am both marveled and frightened by the reality of being mostly bacteria cells (9 to 1 actually),” says Priest. “Essentially, by harboring 4 billion organisms we are each walking planets. This implies the possibilities of agendas unbeknownst to our scale of day to day survival.”

His piece Body Zoo is a tiny zoological garden of these organisms contained within a sub dermal silicon structure implant in his arm, is inspired by this.

Priest seeks to draw connections between our very distant pasts and our distant futures. “We have but only a short tenure of these molecules,” says Priest. “We eventually offer them back to the universe.”

Sand is the dominant material within this show. With Grains, he makes contoured forms of individually collected grains of sand. Within that established border he invents bizarre landscapes for the surface. “These grains were collected by me over the last 6 months,” says Priest.

Wind and Life works with one single grain of sand from the Bodele depression near Lake Chad in Africa, one of the world’s driest spaces. By the combined effort of dust storms and the Bodele low level jet stream this specific region of the world, that contains little life, produces more than half the dust needed for fertilizing the Amazon rainforest. “While these grains act as transports of life, I use that as a way to discuss them as transports of imagination,” says Priest. “Little single units of inspiration of form.”

In all, Priest’s work asks for different levels of belief. “Artists tell stories; we convince you that a chunk of material is something else, that it stands for something else, that it represents something bigger and more profound. I want people to question everything, not just my creations, but the world around them.”

Brian James Priest received his BFA from Herron School of Art and Design in 2004 and his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. He is currently a visiting lecturer at California Polytechnic State University where he instructs sculpture, intermedia, and art theory. Other professional activities have included operating the Biscuits and Gravy Gallery and working in various set design and fabrication shops. He has recently had exhibitions at Midwest Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Art, and White Flag Project Space and is a 2008 Efroymson Fellow.

This exhibition is sponsored by:
The Efroymson Family Fund, Hotbed Creative, the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, Murphy Art Center L.L.C., and The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation.

Click here to see pictures from the opening night of My Son The Future Time Traveler.

Cincinnati based artist Ryan Mulligan’s work has always revolved around magical thinking. His show My Son The Future Time Traveler opening at iMOCA June 3^rd is no exception. A 30 foot wall mural and “TV drawings” will take over the front gallery. In the back gallery of iMOCA, a time machine built for Mulligan’s 5 month old son, Hobbs.

The time machine deals with his new role of being a father and will feature collections related to the idea that one day his son will be a time traveler.

“These shelves of objects and clusters of paintings are my way of dealing with the fear that I can’t protect this little guy,” said Mulligan.  “That I can’t accurately communicate with him.  And that I’m not supposed to be his best friend; I’m supposed to take care of him.”

Most of Mulligan’s work is autobiographical. He’s kept the themes and obsessions that previously drove his work; becoming a parent has added weight to those obsessions. It gives Mulligan’s new body of work both intensity and lightheartedness.

Before his own fatherhood, his work revolved around his father. In 1985 when Mulligan was four years old his father was hit by a drunk driver.

“It scrambled his brains, says Mulligan. “Of course I didn’t really know him before that but everyone said he was different.”

His dad deteriorated as the years went by. In 1990 when Mulligan was in high school, his father beat up his mother. Mulligan’s anger at his father led to him create artwork.

“I spent the night writing on this display board then realized people shouldn’t read it so I tried to cover it up with house paint and then by beating it to a pulp. I realized it was art and I wanted to do it forever.”

By 2006 his father was in assisted living.

“All my work was all about figuring out how to deal with this. In college the anger stopped and turned into nuanced conversation about what it means to be a man. I figured out, the less story I told directly, the more universal it became.”

In 2008 his father died. Mulligan continued to use his art to cope with the loss. He dabbled in nearly every medium of art, from painting, to video, to performance. But found he was soon was successful in dealing with his father’s death. It had a negative effect on his drive to create work.

“ I had to realize that once the anger was gone, I could still make work.  I don’t think enough people are honest about that in their work.  Something motivates us, and it is almost always an internal motivator.”

Ryan Mulligan’s show, My Son Future Time Traveler ,will be up at iMOCA, 1043 Virginia Avenue, Indianapolis, In 46203, June 3-July 16 Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. iMOCA will host an opening reception June 3^rd 6-11 p.m.

About Mulligan

Born and raised in rural Virginia, Ryan Mulligan attended Virginia Commonwealth University for his MFA and is now Assistant Professor of Art for the University of Cincinnati. He currently is the coordinator of the Art Foundations Program, and teaches students to continually explore their own lives as source material, and maintain a ceaselessly productive studio practice.

This exhibition is sponsored by:

The Efroymson Family Fund, the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, Murphy Art Center L.L.C., Penrod Foundation, and HotBed Creative.

Click here to see pictures from the opening reception.

Inner City Inspirations: An Artist’s Evolution in Clay features the work of Malcolm Mobutu Smith. Curated by Mark Ruschman, the exhibition provides an in-depth visual explanation of how Smith’s roots in the hip-hop and graffiti worlds inspired and informed his development as an educator and artist. The show will include a full-scale graffiti mural in collaboration with local graffiti writers FAB Crew, setting a visual stage for a broad sampling of three-dimensional ceramic vessels and sculptures, traversing his career as a contemporary ceramic artist.

Community partnerships include IPS School #2, Center for Inquiry grade school, located 725 N. New Jersey Street in downtown Indianapolis. Working with the art teacher, Ms. Daphne Draa, and the school’s 5^th and 6^th grade art club, Smith enlisted the students in the creation of the graffiti mural which will be included in the exhibition.

Malcolm Mobutu Smith is associate professor of Ceramic Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He earned his MFA degree from the New York College of ceramics at Alfred University in 1996. As an undergraduate, he studied at both the Kansas City Art Institute and Penn State University receiving his BFA in ceramics in 1994.

This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of Indiana University: Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost, School of education, Indiana University Foundation and Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs, AMACO/Brent (American Art Clay Co.), The Efroymson Family Fund, HotBed Creative,  Christel DeHaan Family Foundation and Murphy Art Center L.L.C.

Click here to see the video documenting the creation of the mural.

Click this link to read NUVO’s coverage of Smith.

Click this link to see NUVO critic Dan Grossman’s review of the show.

Click here to see pictures from the opening reception.

Christos Koutsouras: Reflections of Sea and Light,  an evocative exhibition, included seven new paintings, an installation, and a retrospective of Koutsouras’s work. In addition, Editions Limited, Big Car and iMOCA partnered on a one-night show opening night in Big Car Gallery, featuring an additional 10 new paintings. The exhibitions are the result of his return to the United States and feeling “home” for the first time in Portland, Oregon.

At the heart of the exhibition is his desire to return to the sea. Koutsouras spent his childhood diving, sketching and reading about the ocean. He left his home on the island of Samos when he was 17 and became an ocean navigator. When he was 25, he gave up sailing to study art. In 1996, he came to New York where he met the mother of two of his children, an Indianapolis native. He and his then wife moved to Indianapolis in 1998 where he had studios at the Murphy Art Center and Harrison Center of Arts. “I ripened as an artist in Indianapolis.” says Koutsouras. He left Indianapolis in 2005 to move to Seattle.

After a two-year plus break from painting, Koutsouras found the studio in Astoria, Oregon he coins “Big Red” and began painting again. Right on the Pacific Ocean, the space rocks with the waves and howls during storms. “It’s immediate it touches your skin when you hear the sound, and the wind goes through the cracks.  You can’t be depressed. You are there dealing with it, transforming it into a drawing or painting,” he said.

Through a wooden installation in iMOCA, he’ll share with Indianapolis the spirit of studio — complete with sounds captured there during a storm. Koutsouras hopes the Indianapolis audience will find refuge in his work the way he has, connecting to each piece the sense of place and security he feels in the studio.

“When I found my studio, I finally felt at home in America. After 16 years I don’t have any thoughts of going to Europe. I used to carry my passport always on the run,” he said. “Not anymore. I hope the pieces will resonate on the same level they do to me.”

He captures his newfound solace by focusing on the color grey and with a new approach to creating the work. “It came piece by piece. Usually I work on two to three pieces at a time. But for this show, each piece is a progression of the one before, one is referring to the other whether it is from the line or the progressive wave,” he said.

And he starts each piece thinking of the color grey. “There is always something in the shade of grey,” says Koutsouras. “Once you get the grey right you can go everywhere with it.”

Read  NUVO art critic, Dan Grossman’s review here.

NUVO coverage of Koutsouras here.

Click here to see photos from the opening reception.

Informal Relations: Contemporary works on paper curator Scott Grow selected 32 artists from the United States, Germany, Spain and Japan to focus on the diversity of practices within painting and abstraction today.

The exhibition’s title refers to kind the “informal relations” artists have with one another, their predecessors, with the modernist tradition, the future, and even with their own work. While works on paper may stand as finished works, they are also often places for exploration, thinking, planning, taking chances, and failure.

The show explores the challenges of abstract art. Since it typically refuses expected representation, language and absolute interpretation, it requires the viewer’s engagement and participation. Abstraction is not a singular school or style, the term itself is not necessarily helpful in identifying the qualities or concepts of the art object. Abstract artists often have shared and conflicting objectives for the art they make.

In response to these challenges with their genre of art, each artist in Informal Relations presents a definition of abstract painting. The exhibition explores the similarities, differences, and connections between these artists, their dialog with abstraction’s history, and various directions forward for abstraction.

Participating artists include: Patrick Alt, Chris Ashley, Patrick Berran, Kadar Brock, Matthew Deleget, Laura Fayer, Keltie Ferris, Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, Connie Goldman, Brent Hallard, Rachel Hayes, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Michael Just, Matthew Langley, Jim Lee, Rossana Martinez, Rob Nadeau, Melissa Oresky, Paul Pagk, Danielle Riede, Maximilian Rödel, Eric Sall, Susan Scott, Gabriel J. Shuldiner, Jessica Snow, Henning Straßburger, Garth Weiser, Wendy White, Paige Williams, Douglas Witmer, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and John Zurier.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.