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.
Read MoreWith 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.
“Words cannot describe everything we feel. How can one accurately verbalise the sensation we feel when we’re a newborn and our mother holds us in her arms, and we feel her skin on our cheek. We clearly feel her warmth and humidity, some feeling of love from her, but it’s tough to verbalise it perfectly. Music is a language that can translate that sensation, feeling, the memory of love.” — Hatis Noit
Read MoreOcean resembles a soap opera, but with the eerily calm, disembodied voice-over of a guided meditation: “If you don’t want to drown, be an ocean.” The video begins by instructing the viewer to adjust her posture in relation to the screen and finishes by likening the viewer’s smile at her reflection to “the embarrassment of a blind date”—a playful take on Brechtian Verfremdung.
Read MoreMost 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.
Read MoreTo walk through the installation, Mem, is to enter a myth. A kaleidoscope of the divine feminine, there are fountains of light centering the space on the painting of Miriam– one of the seven major prophetesses of Israel. Miriam carried a rock from which flowed an abundant amount of water during the 40 years Jewish people searched for a place to live in the desert. Access to this water made survival of her people possible.
Read MoreThe abstract textiles and works on paper by Julian Jamaal Jones for his exhibit Take Me Back glean fragments from the songs, poetry, sounds, and his feelings for the Black church experience of the 1990s. The exhibit opens Jan. 5 and runs through March 24 at Tube Factory artspace. Chief curator, Shauta Marsh, was instantly drawn to the works, seeing an element of emotive storytelling in the abstract pieces — something that is quite unique.
Read MoreMeggan Gould’s Sorry, No Pictures examines photographic tools and technologies and their constant teeter on the edge of obsolescence. Gould takes apart and re-contextualizes the smallest aspects of the medium, including the iconography of camera dials, the design of viewfinder patterns, and the ubiquitous Epson inkjet printer test pattern. Intertwined with personal narrative, the artist uses “playful resistance” in her work to question the role of corporations and manufacturers of photographic technologies — from Kodak to Flickr — in shaping photography, image-making, vision, and the language surrounding the medium.
Read MoreMany have experienced grief with the loss of someone close to them, but what if that someone was yourself?
Transgender people have lived and existed in many forms for many centuries. Today, there are many possible (physical, emotional, and mental) changes made by Trans people to feel affirmed in their own body. To “come out” or “transition” has required some Trans people to abandon a self they do not recognize. This act of abandonment and process of grieving one’s self is common for many Queer and Trans people who were not raised in affirming environments.
Read MoreArte Mexicano en Indiana and Big Car Collaborative are partnering to present the works by Mexican Daniela Martín del Campo & and Colombian Artist Gloomy Zauros. GOLDEN MYST represents a unique visual and spiritual experience, where chromatic limitation becomes a window to reflection and contemplation: the deep black of the ink, the shimmering gold and the immaculate white of the paper.
Read MoreAs 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).
Read MoreNot Sorry We’re Closed is an exhibition inspired by and questions American society’s live-to-work mentality, and is comprised primarily of hyper-realistic oil paintings. DePauli’s pieces preserve and draw attention to objects and scenes from the lighter side of daily life: a worn bicycle seat, a chimney on the grill in summer, a homemade skate ramp in a fenced-in backyard, a ballcap lying in the garden proclaiming “RETIRED, No Phone! No Fax! No Stress! No Worries!” The surface meaning of these items and scenes are emphasized as a lifestyle to aspire to rather than objects to contemplate.
Read More“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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreDrawings From The Well explores sources of individual creative spirit and drive. Within the well lies all parts of the self; from the surface we draw from daily, to depths seldom acknowledged. At the point of overflow, the depths begin to rise allowing those motives and feelings to become visible. I find these periodic wellings to be helpful in self understanding, and important to growth. Every well contains all of our influences, memories, and perspectives; the fibers of the self held at varying depths. Multifaceted in our nature; humans take on more interests, roles, and traits than we are often aware of. Trips to the depths of the well can feel treacherous, however with exploration comes clarity upon surfacing.
Read MoreSentida is a collection of Selena Ward’s recent installation pieces that serves as a visual memoir for her surge in personal reflection and self discovery within recent years. Bookmaking, quiltmaking and image making all feature to dissect her feelings of displacement within her own Chicana identity, explore her obscured ancestral history, and question conflicting ideas on beauty, womanhood, love, domesticity, and loss.
Read MoreI’ve lived in Indianapolis for almost 4 years, it’s my home. I’ve explored many depths of this city. It’s a blur to me now. I see the same buildings and people every other day.
Read MoreWhile her present artistic practice grew roots in classical cello and midnight poetry, Em Elise has always been fascinated by the body and its languages. She sees patterns of birth and death as ever present: from ephemeral relationships between lovers to the synchronicity between menstruation and la luna.
Read MoreThis 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.”
Read MoreIn 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.
Read More
