Amy Kligman: Shrines of the Luminous Halo

Imagine you're stepping into a bubble, a space filled with all the thoughts that drift through your mind in a single day. What do you surround yourself with? What defines you? And how do you interact or move around these objects that symbolize yourself.

Each painting is a glimpse into our inner world, specifically focusing on the objects we choose to surround ourselves with. Arranged in a deliberate, symmetrical way, these objects represent who we are. The exhibit's title is inspired by Virginia Woolf's idea of a "luminous halo"—a semi-transparent layer that envelops us from the moment we become conscious until the end.

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Chicken Chapel of Love

When you open The Chicken Chapel of Love’s hand-carved wooden doors inscribed with the latin phrase Vide cor meum (See My Heart), you’re greeted with stained glass windows filtering the east-rising sun, gilded gold, neon lights, red velvet curtains, taxidermied roosters, warm wood church pews, wax candles of all colors — some lit, some melted. The space represents the heart of humanity, the heart of the chicken. Our destinies and fates are overlapping and intertwining like those with whom we choose to share our lives.

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special projectShauta Marsh
Christen Baker: New! and Impervious to Natural Elements

Most of us live in a world of constant noise and overstimulation, fragmenting our own perception and memory. Information (and misinformation) overload has forever changed the human experience thanks to constant access to the Internet. Instead of living in the moment, we are constantly challenged by the temptation of filling the void with seconds-long dopamine boosts reinforced by our personal algorithms in our artificial digital worlds.

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exhibitionJulie Xiao2024
Ilana Harris-Babou: Selected Works

Ilana Harris-Babou is a multimedia artist whose video works are an important component of a practice that includes sculpture and object making, performance, and installation. In her projects, Harris-Babou mines the aesthetics of YouTube tutorials, home improvement and cooking shows, and corporate ad campaigns to call attention to how personal and social identities are constructed—and co-opted—by dominant ideologies.

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Keren Cytter: Rose Garden

Cytter's short 2014 film explores the unsettling duality of American culture's ideals regarding being protectors of life and harbingers of death. This title is a reference to both the 1964 Joanne Greenburg book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which deals with mental illness and the 1971-84 Marine Corp recruitment campaign “We Don’t Promise You A Rose Garden.” These references are meant to clue the viewer in that the seemingly ordinary setting hides a distorted reality. As the tension builds, multiple guns and disjointed conversations between characters escalate the sense that the calm is about to be shattered. A chaotic shooting spree unfolds against the backdrop of normal daily life. The chilling final scene serves as a grim conclusion addressing violence and its pervasive presence within American culture.


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SOMA

A group exhibition featuring the work of Jo Archuleta, Nehemiah Cisneros, Tommy Lomeli, Katherine Looney, October Sharify, Isaac Tapia and Cesar Velez exploring the supernatural and ethereal states of somatic responses. Guest curated by Yashi Davalos the exhibit is inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, where soma was a fictional drug used to pacify civilians in a state of existential bliss and disassociation. Exploring the socialized perceptions of figures occupying space, Soma takes on confronting perceived utopia and dysmorphia in this exhibition.

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Will Higgins: Museum of Fabulosity

Included in this pop-up museum, made to resemble a small-town history museum, are 16 amazing stories, many so strange they may seem made-up. But they are not made up. They are all absolutely true. They are paired with amazing photographs and also fabulous objects that approximate long lost Indy icons — boxing gloves worn by Lou Thomas the night he killed Arne Andersson; the chair Cannonball Adderly tipped back in the night he discovered Wes Montgomery; James Snow’s Panama hat; Jinx Dawson’s skull; Max Emmerich’s spikes…”

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Jason Wesaw: Sovereign Spirits

Potawatomi (Turtle Clan) artist Jason Wesaw’s exhibit consisting of sculpture, drawings, prints, and installation is linked to the beliefs of his culture related to land, specifically the ground where Tube Factory now sits. This land has been part of Potawatomi lands at different times in history before the United States existed. For this reason, Wesaw used earth and materials from Terri Sisson Park on the Tube Factory campus to create some of the works in this fully commissioned show.

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Picnic at the Park

Join us for this powerful performance that explores the unpredictable nature of life and the strength it takes to move forward in the face of adversity. A seemingly perfect picnic on a sunny day turns to chaos, reminding us that faith is a choice, and joy is a decision: even in the most unpredictable of circumstances. But as the storm rages on, so does our resilience.

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Tree of 40 Fruit: 126 Tube Factory

This truly unique single tree grows 40 different types of stone fruit — including peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries, and almonds. Our tree is titled 126 Tube Factory because it is artist Sam Van Aken’s 126 tree he created for this site through the process of grafting branches into the tree. The Tree of 40 Fruit blossoms in varied tones of pink, crimson, and white each spring. And, in the summer, it bears various fruits. This is one of 20 trees like this around the world. These trees are not only creative endeavors but also serve as conservation efforts, preserving heirloom and antique fruit varieties not commonly found in commercial agriculture.

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Ben Hall: Trunk Rattle Sound Bath

Trunk Rattle Sound Bath merges ongoing areas of Ben Hall’s research into polyrhythm (the simultaneous use of two or more contrasting rhythms), sonic immersion, and ancestral resonance through the lens of embodied listening. The title draws from the cultural experience of low-end frequencies booming from car trunks — windows shaking with no discernible rhythm, the body absorbing it all. “Vibrational frequencies are in everything,” Hall says. “Our bodies. We are observing by vibration even when we shut down. Our nervous system is still there, thrumming.”

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Flore Laurentienne

Each performance is a chance to step into a world where music and nature intertwine—a rare and intimate experience.

Flore Laurentienne is an open window to the technicolor soundscapes of Mathieu David Gagnon – the Canadian composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who shapes vast orchestral sound to interpret the rugged wilderness and waters of his native Québec. The namesake of an inventory documenting St. Lawrence Valley flora, Flore Laurentienne illumes the science and spirit of his surrounds through expansive string orchestrations melded with the textures and experimentation of early analogue synths.

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Steven Yazzie and Nancy Baric: The Nearness of Distance

“My Child, I will feed you, give you good health, and I will give you strength and courage.”

These are the opening words of Steven J. Yazzie’s 2015 video, Mountain Song, which appear scrawled across the inky blank screen in white letters. The work evokes that of an epic poem akin to Homer or Virgil, signifying a journey that lies before the one who watches and listens to it.

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Terri Sisson Park

Terri Sisson Park, designed by Rundell Ernstberger’s Daniel Liggett in close collaboration with Big Car Collaborative staff artists, features many ways for visitors to experience and enjoy art and nature while also socializing with others. It’s open to the public during daylight hours.

The park greenspace borders and connects the two contemporary art museum buildings on our campus, nature, and local waterways. And these welcoming and restorative spaces have really helped establish our block as a campus. They directly tie in with the idea that the museum serves as a center for peace and restoration in the community.

The Efroymson Family Fund made the naming of Terri Sisson Park possible. Terri Sisson is the mother of Big Car co-founder and Tube Factory curator, Shauta Marsh. Dedicating the park to Terri, who passed away in 2022, is especially fitting because the park is a shrine to motherhood.

“Otherhood and Motherhood are two main themes that thread through this greenspace,” Marsh says. “It’s a place for people who have no one. It’s a space for people who have more people in their life than they know what to do with.”

“My mother was a bottomless ocean of love and patience,” Marsh says. “She saw the best in people. And that’s the spirit the world really needs. That’s why we will celebrate her with the naming of this park. It was the meaning of her to hold a space for everyone, for total strangers, for friends, for family.”

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Benjamin Berg:░▓ I Can See the Pixels ▓░

Computers do whatever you tell them to, even if you tell them to make a mistake.

There are some seemingly bad ideas behind Benjamin Berg's exhibition I Can See the Pixels. For starters, everything is created using the 1980s-era GIF image format, which is hated by today's computer programmers for its limited color palette and inefficient storage. Also, the source images are small and low-resolution. Worst of all, he forces his computer to use colors that are totally wrong, nowhere close to the ones it needs. What's wrong with this picture?

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Julie Xiao: A Journey

Thirty-foot-long scrolls telling a story of self acceptance and belonging will fill the Main Gallery of Tube Factory artspace starting November 1. The “Jellyfish Person” is the central character in Indianapolis-based artist Julie Xiao’s large-scale ink and gouache works. In Xiao’s immersive exhibit, the audience will follow — and may identify with Jellyfish’s pursuit of finding a place to feel welcomed at, to fit in, and to feel at home.

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exhibitionJulie Xiao2024
Elisa Harkins: Ekvnv (Land), the Sacred Mother from Which We Came

With this exhibit, Harkins looks at land in two different ways: a path toward healing due to the desecration of burial mounds in New Harmony, Indiana and how the Land Back movement addresses climate change. Harkins, a multi-disciplinary artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Tube Factory curator Shauta Marsh, researched and worked on this exhibit for five years as part of Big Car Collaborative’s decade-long research project, Social Alchemy, that explores utopia and dystopia with an emphasis on the southern Indiana town of New Harmony that was twice the site of utopian experiments.  


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