Exhibitions

As the United States continues to face its history of enslavement, oppression, and exclusion of Black Americans in museums and other arenas of power and recognition, “Process as Practice: Reimagining the Lost Hardrick Mural” is impactful and unique. The exhibit is part of an ongoing partnership between artist Kaila Austin; the Norwood community on the southeast side of Indianapolis, and the family of Indiana’s Harlem Renaissance painter, John Wesley Hardrick (1891-1968).

“In 2015 — after over a decade of painting and art making — I asked myself what brought me to want to create in the first place. Thinking back to my childhood, it was probably directly linked to enjoying playing with plastic blocks and how excited I was to get my hands on a grid-lined sketchbook. I would design my own toys and sketch out the floor plans for houses, cars and symmetrical objects.

The narrative of femininity is pain.

Cicatrix: the scar of a healed wound. In botany, cicatrix refers to the keloid mark left on a tree after a piece of it has been removed. In this body of work, I am exploring the personal maternal scar of being taken away from the only real parental figure I had until that point in life, the complex scars of colonialism and immigration, and the physical scars of my own body.

This body of work is an exploration of the physical and figurative aspects of “place.” On one hand, the word “place” refers to our built environment, choices of design, and our interactions with the physical world. On the other hand, it refers to a sense of belonging that is cultural and emotional–still deeply tied to the physical world, but able to exist without it through memory. I invite the viewer to step into the threshold separating “here and now” from”‘then and there.” 

In this body of work, I am exploring the dream that there are still places and things we have not discovered, things we may not even comprehend. Inside of familiar volumes such as instrument cases and terrariums, I am creating spaces that give a glimpse of some other world, somewhere weird and wrong. This is Cthutopia.

In an exploration of this concept, “Grief Etiquette” is an immersive installation about the non-linear stages of my grief, shown through archival imagery and sound.

With “HERE IT IS IT ALWAYS IS,” Russell continues to explore themes of hope, anxiety, compassion and our place in an ever-expanding universe.

In Unearthing, Stirratt explores how natural and cultural objects are presented in collections and museum settings, and how we preserve, classify, and display them.

Life-sized, sprawling canvases house images of animals that learned to live in new worlds, in habitats created by humans. Vidger’s painted canvases are aged with natural elements to move away from traditional, romanticized landscapes. She removes the animals from their environments, from their homes so we see them in this state of limbo, wondering where they go next. “By utilizing natural pigments to age my canvases, I present an alternative landscape that expresses the duality of desolation and splendor.”

For artist Adam Ekberg, moving past boredom means finding a space in which the mind is free to devise a logic of its own, and ordinary objects are liberated from the drudgery of daily life. The resulting photographic interventions are both mysterious and delightful. Cocktail umbrellas no longer shade tropical beverages but rather occupy a sunny beach en masse. Roller skates once relegated to an indoor rink now drag-race across an empty field propelled by burning aerosol cans.

“Fag Family is a series of double portraits of individuals in Nick May's queer community. "These portraits capture the queer relationships, queer spaces, and the liberating magic of queer world-building that I have the privilege to observe and be a part of,” says May.

Pathology is a compilation of photographs, discovered by Taylor and his brother in their grandfather’s attic. The photos, depicting violence and death, were taken during the time he served as a coroner between 1981 and 1990. As Lewandowski reflects on death and is forced to confront it, he writes about the tragic nature of the photographs he shares and pointing to the complicated ideas behind life as he reflects upon the people his grandfather photographed and the endless cycle of life and death.

Amidst an array of light and sound, Skärgården re-imagines cold war paranoia in the Stockholm archipelago in light and sound. The heart of this art installation is a self-organizing wireless mesh network that mirrors aspects of both the isolation and cooperation of an interconnected system of separate parts.

Those of African descent are the most underrepresented group in the world of fine art.  Black faces are beautiful. Digging deeper, we see that by working on black surfaces with white ink & paint, Reynolds draws in the light instead of the shadow, with emotive figures emerging from the deep, catching light in the way only melanin can.

The number of sites of incarceration—where people are “pinned
down”—is big as well. It makes sense, right? We need a lot of
buildings and cells in which to lock up all these folks.
Federal prisons. State prisons. County jails. City jails. Local lockups.

Part world’s fair exhibit, huckster wagon, dime museum, and midway arcade; Snake Oil is a multifaceted installation that challenges the viewer to re-examine the ideas of American Exceptionalism.

Stormy Weather depicts cyclical expressions of anxiety by layering patterns repeatedly into surfaces and space. The paintings and assemblages explore intimate, personal anxiety, and multiply/mirror/repeat the individual to reflect a larger communal state of unease and worry — a collective angst. Uncertainty is stressful, but it is a precursor to transformation.

Welcome to a world where grownups still build forts and play with flashlights. Where physics are not a classroom subject but a tender and flamboyant muse. Rachel Leigh teases out the sumptuousness of thrift-store glass and discarded TVs, bathing visitors in luminous, improbable delights.