Lori Miles, "Pieta (Why Deny the Obvious Child)"
Digital Print on panel
2019
30"x20"
In conjunction with Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Cloud Divination, the Main Gallery video room will screen Ballet Austin's "Cult of Color: Call to Color," a collaboration by choreographer and Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills, visual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock and composer Graham Reynolds.
"Cult of Color: Call to Color" is a chapter in Trenton Doyle Hancock’s ongoing artistic mythology. Hancock’s paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and individual performances work together to represent his characters, the Mounds, the Vegans, and other imaginative creatures, who are at the center of the artist’s unfolding operatic narrative. Hancock’s characters and their dilemmas embody themes of life and death, the struggle between good and evil, love, authority, spirituality and moral relativism. Biblical in scope, mythological in content, and comic book in style, the story tells of a battle fought between the gentle Mounds and the mutant Vegans. In this chapter of Hancock’s story we are introduced to the Vegan minister, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards) who, like his namesake, offers the possibility of salvation to the unruly and war-like Vegan followers through the intervention of a loving character, Painter. And, just as all the Vegans appear to convert to the goodness of “The Cult of Color,” one antagonist, Betto Watchow, resists. The ensuing violent struggles for power between these forces of will are at the core of this episode of Hancock’s tale. Balancing moral dilemmas with wit and a musical sense of language and color, Hancock creates a painterly space of psychological dimension.
The Collaboration
This unique project originated with Stephen Mills, Ballet Austin’s Artistic Director, who invited Trenton Doyle Hancock and Graham Reynolds to collaborate with him to create a new ballet based on Hancock’s ongoing visual narrative. Reynolds composed the music as well as the sound environments, and Mills created the unique choreography. Hancock conceived the story, designed the costumes, sets and properties which include a backdrop curtain and fabric made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia."--Via Arthouse (Austin, TX)
The work was selected by Woolfalk and Tube Factory curator, Shauta Marsh as part of a series of artists that have influenced Woolfalk's work. "Cult of Color: Call to Color" will run through October 3.
About Hancock
Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK. Raised in Paris, Texas, Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, at the time becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the prestigious survey. In 2014, his exhibition, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA. In 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA in 2019. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL; the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah and Atlanta, GA; The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Photo:"Vegans and Mounds in the Forest" Tony Spielberg
TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK
Courtesy of Trenton Doyle Hancock and James Cohan Gallery.
Sept. 6 — Jan. 11
In this new exhibition, New-York-based multi-media artist Saya Woolfalk explores our understanding of the human condition — a state of affairs governed by seemingly unavoidable conflicts such as birth, growth, and death. This show explores how technology has allowed us to ease our suffering by making change less difficult and transformation more enjoyable. Perhaps the ultimate human technological advancement would be the elimination of mortality by extending human life indefinitely in a biological, digital, or other virtual state. Recent advances suggest our species may already be on the cusp of achieving this evolutionary landmark.
Woolfalk’s exhibit at Tube Factory includes her signature installations, sculptures, prints, video art works, and the works of artists who influence her practice. It builds on one of her first projects, "No Place" (a play on the translation of the word utopia), where she collaborated with filmmaker and anthropologist Rachel Lears. Both then in their mid 20s, they invited people into Woolfalk’s studio to talk about their ideas of utopia and created work from there.
“Similar to the way you would construct a folktale, we took these ideas and we constructed the culture of the NoPlaceans. People would come to the studio, put on costumes and enact the things that they were imagining,” says Woolfalk who created a six-chapter ethnographic film about this future utopian world based on people’s visions.
To explore the conceptual boundaries of this cultural moment, this also led Woolfalk to create a fictional transhuman species known as "the Empathics", which she describes as a race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. “If you have a utopia, then how do you actually make that utopia real? I worked with biologists at Tufts University to think about what in nature could occur in order for people to mutate to become more like plants.”
Woolfalk’s Tube Factory installation will extend the story of "the Empathics", blending multi-media aesthetic phenomena, spirituality, cultural hybridization, capitalism, technoscience, and artificial intelligence to conjure a broad network of interconnecting philosophical strands. Informed equally by science fiction and anthropology, the morally ambiguous future that the exhibit shares is open to the interpretation of its viewers. “Going from modularity to monumentality is how I approach my practice. I work in ways that are incredibly small and I also work in ways that are incredibly big. The work functions like collage.”
Should we fear the world Woolfalk and other transhumanist artists are mapping? Should we embrace it? Should we shrug it off as a Pollyannic fantasy, doomed by the human idiot factor? Woolfalk seems to be implying a potentially disturbing fourth option: Some of us — particularly those with special status or outlandish means — have already started to transform. Is this art, or a warning shot across the cultural bow of the human race?
About the artist
Woolfalk (b 1979, Japan) is a pioneer within an emergent, international aesthetic movement examining transhumanism — a theoretical belief that humans will mobilize technology to transcend their biological limitations and evolve into a non-human, or “posthuman” race. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of The Empathics and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout Asia, Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2012); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2014); the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2014); SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA (2016); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2016); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2016); the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA (2017) and group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others.
“When I started making work it was very important that it was not autobiographical,” says Woolfalk. “The work is not about me at all. The work is about talking to people about their ideas and trying to understand what’s going on in the world then taking that material and adapting it into installation based spaces that people can experience.”
Made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Efroymson Family Fund.
Part of the Social Alchemy Series, this exhibition is in partnership with the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art.
Image: Saya Woolfalk, "Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination", Plate 2, 30”x40”, 2018.
Live performances involve group chanting, a shrine, a cassette boom box and telephone mic to create a lo-fi shamanic Hip Hop ceremony; a boom bap sound bath. His moniker is inspired by the brilliant writings of Taraka Larson of the band Prince Rama. In November 2018, he released the first single, "Come out of Hiding" from his forthcoming debut album, Transition Vision. The record is a sound he dubs: Hep Cat Hippie Hop. Now Age Emcee considers himself a part of a transition team, using music to aid in our personal and social development into a new society. Thump goes the evolution!
The Otolith Group’s latest video, O Horizon, 2018, comes out of a long-standing research interest in Rabindranath Tagore and his founding of Visva-Bharati, a school in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, which was meant to be a living laboratory and an experiment in art, life, and craft. Here, the founders of the group, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, discuss their motivations for shooting on location and the Tagorean ethics that animate the work.
The title refers to the surface layer of soil, changed in the area around Santiniketan as the result of Tagore’s introduction of new flora in development of the campus. In studying this trajectory, the film extends The Otolith Group’s ongoing consideration of the Anthropocene, a premise that denotes that the current geological age is one wherein human activity spurs the primary changes on climate and the environment. With O Horizon, The Otolith Group also proposes that Tagore’s project maps onto the notion of terraforming—a term originating in science fiction and now more widely used—whereby a party (typically but not always an interloper) reshapes the atmosphere of a place for their own needs.
O Horizon reflects upon modernist theories of dance and song developed by Tagore and the experimental practices of mural, sculpture, painting, and drawing developed by India’s great modernist artists affiliated with Santiniketan: K.G. Subramanyan, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. O Horizon draws together visual arts, dance, song, music, and recital to assemble a structure of feeling of the Tagorean imagination in the 21st Century.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
A short film that critically illuminates the design by the Israeli architect and former Bauhaus student Arieh Sharon for the University of Ife campus, Ile–Ife, Nigeria, built in 1962 as part of an Israeli assistance program in West-Africa.
Zvi Efrat, architect and architectural historian, is a partner in Efrat-Kowalsky Architects (EKA) and was head of the Department of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, from 2002 until 2010. He studied at Pratt Institute, at NYU, and at Princeton University. He has taught at several universities, lectured worldwide, published extensively, and curated numerous exhibitions, among them Borderline Disorder at the Israeli Pavilion of the 8th Architectural Biennale, Venice, in 2002, and The Object of Zionism at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel in 2011. His book, The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture 1948–1973, was published in Hebrew in 2004.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Caribbean activist and writer Hermina Huiswoud through dialogues and appearances by contemporary protagonists. Both Stam-Beese and Huiswoud spent time working in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and both ended up being active in the Netherlands after WWII.
Two Stones was filmed in the 1930s constructivist district of KhTZ in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the first large housing project on which Lotte Stam-Beese worked, and in Stam-Beese’s celebrated 1950s Pendrecht, designed during her period as Rotterdam’s main architect / urban planner.
In the 1970s, Hermina Huiswoud was agitating against the Rotterdam housing rule, which limited Caribbean Dutch inhabitants to settle in any of the city’s districts if their presence would exceed 5% of the population.
Resonances as well as dissonances between the distinct trajectories of the two women and their expectation from communist ideology, are sensed through thoughts and experiences of the protagonists, who all have a personal or professional relation to the issues at hand.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Shelley Selim is the Associate Curator of Design and Decorative Arts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. She provides curatorial oversight of the museum’s design and decorative art collections, as well as its two historic homes—the Lilly House and the Miller House and Garden. Her recent projects includeMeadow, an interactive installation by artists Studio Drift now on display at the IMA’s Efroymson Entrance Pavillion, and a reinstallation of the IMA’s Design Gallery—the largest permanent collection gallery devoted to modern and contemporary design of any museum in the country. Prior to her arrival at the IMA, she was the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Assistant Curator at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. She has edited and written numerous publications about design, craft, and art, and has also lectured widely on these topics. She earned her MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Parsons, the New School for Design.
Attia’s recent two-part film The Body’s Legacies (Part 1: The Objects; Part 2: The Postcolonial Body) is an extensive account of testimonies by academics, scholars, collectors, and museum directors from Canada, the US, Ivory Coast, and many other locations, relating the histories behind bodies and artifacts from the world over.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Barry Gaunt will speak about alien abduction and the effect of the phenomenon on one’s life.
Barry, currently serves as a member of the renowned Society of the Supernatural. He is the MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) State Director of Kentucky and is a STAR Team Certified Field Investigator for MUFON. He is also a Cohost of “Into The Fire” a podcast on Blog Talk Radio. He is the Managing Director of the NightStalkers Paranormal Research Team, which researches, and investigates Hauntings, UFO Reports, Alien Abductions, and Strange Creature reports on a case by case basis.
Barry is a full-time volunteer at the famed and haunted Octagon Hall Museum and assists the Museum Director with the daily operations of the Museum, along with hosting the Museum’s popular Novice Hunts with his paranormal team, Nightstalkers Paranormal. He is an Administrator for the Kentucky UFO Research Center on Facebook, and he is currently writing a book on the UFO Phenomenon in Kentucky, which will be published by Leprechaun Publishing in late 2019 or early 2020.
Barry remains science minded, but always keeps an open mind, striving to find the truth, looking for the key to unlock the mysteries of the world we live in, with hopes of answering humanity’s oldest questions. What happens next, and are we alone in the universe?
Yvette Mayorga’s multi-media installation High Maintenance is a flamboyantly chilling revelation, offering unsettling insights into how the forces of violence, make-believe, and consumerism infiltrate the contemporary immigrant experience, and subvert our understanding of identity.
Drawing inspiration from the politics of America’s southern border with Mexico, her own life as a first generation Latinx-American, and her parents’ experiences as immigrants in the 1970s, Mayorga’s work examines how pain and uncertainty are covered with a veneer of celebration.
High Maintenance conjures up an absurdist, Rococo Candy Land, where frivolity intersects with fear, as soldiers and ICE agents come face to face with quinceanera cakes, white swans, and Polly Pocket adventure sets.
Every aspect of Mayorga’s built world is adorned with spectacular, rapacious iconography. Monumental fashion accessories and gendered toys interrogate the true meaning of “status,” while decadent, Colonial aesthetics remind us how fragile national identity is, and how frequently it depends on appearances.
Is this a place of joy or fear? Does it welcome us in all our diversity, or demand our assimilation? Like the guileless inhabitants of Mayorga’s thickly impastoed paintings, the second we enter this uncanny, celebratory-looking tableau, we realize we are caught between a nightmare and a dream.
In partnership with Nopal Cultural and University of Indianapolis.
Made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Arts Council of Indianapolis, Managed Health Services – MHS and Sun King Brewing Company.
Yvette Mayorga lives and works in Chicago. She earned her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, EXPO Chicago 2018, The Vincent Price Art Museum, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The National Museum of Mexican Art. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Guardian, Art News, and Teen Vogue, among others.
A screening of David Schalliol’s The Area will mark the close of his exhibition, Three Communities at Tube Factory artspace.
The Area is a five-year odyssey of a South Side Chicago neighborhood, where more than 400 African-American families are being displaced by a multi-billion dollar freight company. The documentary film follows homeowner-turned-activist Deborah Payne, who vows to be “the last house standing,” and the Row Row Boys, teen friends who must start a new life across gang lines.
A production of Scrappers Film Group, it is a 2017 IFP Documentary Labs awardee and is supported by the Graham Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. The film was also a participant in the Tribeca Film Institute/Kartemquin Films Tribeca Hacks program.
-More about the Film-
DAVID SCHALLIOL — DIRECTOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER, AND PRODUCER
David Schalliol is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College who specializes in visual sociology. In addition to working on The Area, he has contributed to films including the ITVS/Kartemquin Films feature Almost There and the National Film Board of Canada’s Highrise: Out My Window, an interactive documentary that won the 2011 International Digital Emmy for Non-Fiction.
Schalliol is also a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in such publications as Artforum, Mas Context, The New York Times, and Social Science Research, as well as in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural Belfast, Northern Ireland Photo Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project. The Japanese publisher Utakatado released his first book, Isolated Building Studies, in 2014.
BRIAN ASHBY — EDITOR AND PRODUCER
Brian Ashby began his filmmaking career co-directing the feature Scrappers, a three-year chronicle of two families surviving in Chicago’s informal scrap metal economy. Roger Ebert included Scrappers on his Best Documentaries of 2010 list.
Ashby co-created and co-directs two documentary web series: The Grid, distributed through Gapers Block, and Central Standard: On Education, a co-production with WTTW11. He recently co- produced the historical documentary feature Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, which premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Ashby’s documentary projects have been supported by PBS Digital Studios, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, and the Chicago Instructional Technology Foundation, and have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers.
DEBORAH PAYNE — PRODUCER
Deborah Payne is a life-long activist who is dedicated to community development on Chicago’s South Side. She has served as president of the Sherwood Peace Association, the Southwest Federation of Block Clubs, the CAPS Domestic Violence Subcommittee (7th District), and the Sherwood Local Advisory Council, and has worked as a community liaison and photographer for Teamwork Englewood, Chicago Embassy Church, and the Englewood Railroad Coalition.
She is currently the president of the CAPS Domestic Violence Subcommittee (2nd District), a member of the Chicago Public Schools Englewood Steering Committee, and a volunteer at the Englewood Satellite Senior Center and with various women’s shelters.
PETER GALASSI — EDITOR
Peter Galassi is a editor, director, and colorist. Recently, he finished editing Central Standard: On Education, an episodic documentary following five 8th-graders as they try to get into Chicago’s selective enrollment high schools. The show debuted on WTTW11 in the fall and is currently airing on PBS Digital’s YouTube channel.
In 2012 he produced and edited a cut of the feature documentary, Your Name is My Name, which explores the lives of albino children in Zimbabwe. Directed by Osato Dixon, Your Name Is My Name was funded by a Fulbright Scholarship and a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts.
PHOELIX — ORIGINAL MUSIC
Hailing from the Fox Valley, west of Chicago, Phoelix has been constructing a kingdom of his own. On projects like Telefone, Bucket List Project, and Blkswn, he has implemented his own unique taste and influence that blends with eclectic artists such as Noname, Saba, Smino, and producers Monte Booker and Cam O’bi. Out of the studio, he has also toured with Noname, Smino, Eryn Allen Kane, and Jamila Woods. Phoelix’s debut project, GSPL, shows us much more of his identity through the unique sound he adds to the spectrum of music. He says, “Phoelix is like a future version of myself.”
YANA KUNICHOFF — ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Yana Kunichoff is an award-winning investigative journalist and producer based in Chicago. Her work has ranged from coverage of the Arab Spring protests in Bahrain to chronicling of the human casualties of rapidly disappearing affordable housing in Chicago.
Kunichoff won a Sidney Hillman award for her February 2016 investigation for the Chicago Reader into the way Chicago’s police union impacts the narrative around police shootings. Kunichoff’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Fusion.net, Al Jazeera, Pacific Standard and Chicago Magazine, among many others.
DAN RYBICKY — CONSULTING PRODUCER
Dan Rybicky is an award-winning filmmaker and tenured professor in Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He produced and co-directed ITVS/Kartemquin Films’ critically-acclaimed feature documentary Almost There, which screened at over thirty festivals before being distributed theatrically, digitally, and on public television in 2016.
Dan started his filmmaking career working with and consulting in various production capacities for Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, and John Leguizamo. Dan’s latest project a short documentary about health care — filmed in (and titled) Accident, MD — will premiere in the coming year.
ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS
Additional contributors to The Area‘s production include Aaron Cahan, Emmanuel Camacho, Danielle Davis, Natalia Echeverry, Matt Goetz, Astrid Goh, Akemi Hong, Ben Kolak, Hannie Lee, Isabel Mitchell, Ashley Mills, Kiyomi Mino, David Nagel, Mary Otoo, Luis Antonio Perez, Reshmi Rustebakke, Zachary Sala, Alexandra Scott, Agnes Starczewski, Brittain Williams, and Hayden Yaussy.
Join us for a discussion with David Schalliol. Artist, filmmaker, researcher and sociologist, Schalliol will share stories, insights and more about his work.
David Schalliol is a visual sociologist. He is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College and a principal of Scrappers Film Group. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, and been exhibited extensively. Recent exhibitions include the 2017 Chicago Architectural Biennial, the Belfast Photo Festival, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project. He is the author of Isolated Building Studies. His directorial film debut, The Area, premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April 2018. He earned his BA from Kenyon College, and his MA and PhD in the Department of Sociology at The University of Chicago.
Join us for the Indiana premiere of Out There, a concept video album and live performance by the band Princess that explores the roles men play and those they ought to be playing during the current cultural reckoning with misogyny. The video’s science fiction narrative explores the power of the Divine Feminine through collaborations with musician JD Samson, visual artist Jennifer Meridian, and the band TEEN. Out Thererecalls the original power of MTV by building on the long legacy of concept albums like Ziggy Stardust and Deltron 3030.
Princess is a performance art duo, a collaboration between Alexis Gideon and Michael O’Neill that uses music as the backbone of a multidisciplinary practice that explores issues of queerness and the concept of masculinity. Princess was formed in 2004 in the Chicago DIY Performance space, Texas Ballroom. The duo released a self-titled LP and performed until 2006 when they went on to pursue other paths, reuniting for this project in 2017.
Alexis Gideon has performed and exhibited throughout the world, including at Moderna Museet Stokholm, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Vdrome, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Time Zones Festival Italia. He has toured internationally and opened for Dan Deacon and tUnE-yArDs.
Michael O’Neill has collaborated with JD Samson of Le Tigre and, with her, formed the acclaimed art/performance band MEN. MEN toured extensively around the world including festival appearances at Coachella (USA) and Sidney Mardi Gras (AUS), at museums such as SF MoMA (USA) and Museo Rufino Tamayo (MX), and support tours with the Gossip and Peaches.
Jeremy Efroymson Gallery
April 1-June 22
“Bauhaus Imaginista” is a major international project that marks the German art school’s 100th anniversary. Operational from 1919 to 1933, Bauhaus is famous for the approach to design that combined high art and industry. This exhibition rethinks the school from a global perspective, and reads its entanglements against a century of geopolitical change.
The exhibition presents the 4 Gegenstande (Objects) in order to communicate the essential elements of bauhaus imaginista.
“The Bauhaus Manifesto” (1919) is shown through a specially commissioned essay film, exploring the hybrid and transnational influences that shaped its conception and the school’s origins. Marcel Breuer’s collage ein Bauhaus film (1927) was reproduced in the Bauhaus Journal No. 1, an edition of the journal will be reprinted and displayed in the gallery as a stacked multiple available for audiences to take away. Paul Klee’s “Carpet” drawing will be shown in reproduction on a study table detailing the artist’s North African journeys. Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s “Reflective Light Game” is shown through a film projection.
Photo: Paul Klee Rug (kilim), (1927); Hans Snoeck Private Collection, New York
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Admission is free
VISIT US
Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tube is also open until 10 p.m. each First Friday.
Closed Holidays
The workshop Discover Design – Discover Bauhaus by the German Design Museum Foundation provides an opportunity to acquire new knowledge of a shared German – American cultural heritage in a practice-oriented fashion. Why are the ideas of the Bauhaus as a legendary school of architecture, design and art still relevant today? How can we use its ideas for our future? This exciting journey of discovery through the world of design is linked to the celebration of 100 Years of Bauhaus!
The design workshop combines intercultural content with imagination and creativity. Trained designers will provide support and advice. During the theoretical section, key facts about Bauhaus as an evolutionary movement, its leading figures, important projects and ideas will be taught. During the hands on section, the participants can let their creativity run wild and produce their own designs.Theeducational and cultural initiative Entdecke Design(Discover Design) has thus far enabled around 15,000 children and adolescents to discover the world of design.
This workshop is recommended for ages 10-17.
Space is limited. RSVP to info@bigcar.org
This workshop is part of the Year of German-American Friendship initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI).
Photo Credit: Christof Jakob
MONROVIA, INDIANA explores a small town in rural, mid-America and illustrates how values like community service, duty, spiritual life, generosity and authenticity are formed, experienced and lived along with conflicting stereotypes. The film gives a complex and nuanced view of daily life in Monrovia and provides some understanding of a way of life whose influence and force have not always been recognized or understood in the big cities on the east and west coasts of America and in other country.
About filmmaker Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and theater director. His work is “devoted primarily to exploring American institutions”. He has been called “one of the most important and original filmmakers working today.”
Discussion will follow.
Artists Osamu James Nakagawa and Conner Green will present new works that explore outmoded forms of conquest, power, and control—both real and imagined. Nakagawa’s work will consist of an installation of cyanotype prints created while in Okinawa. Green’s new work extends his exploration of monumentality and power through the language of architectural blueprints. The two seemingly disparate bodies of work present the question: How do the forces of power and control manifest themselves in real, immediate ways and in our collective conscious?
FENCES
In James Nakagawa’s work, the landscape often functions as a witness to history and suffering, as well as a platform to examine conflicts political and personal in nature. Raised in Tokyo, Japan, his family moved to Houston, Texas when he was fifteen. As an artist he mines the complicated pasts of both countries, touching on issues related to nationalism, family, pop-culture, tensions between eastern and western ideals, and war. Since 2006, James has produced several series reflecting on the legacy of World War II and Japan-U.S. relations on Okinawa.
Nakagawa started FENCES several years ago, as he was visiting the island to complete MAPS, a series using a frottage technique to create rubbings of words from war memorials. During this time, he had received permission to photograph inside a U.S. base looking through the fence at Okinawa. Nakagawa’s clearance was revoked before he could begin the project following a disagreement with the colonel assigned to him as a PR liaison. The conversation concerned the benefits of the U.S. military station to the island population. In reaction to this change of circumstance and the protests over the Henoko relocation, Nakagawa used leftover paper and cyanotype chemistry to make photograms of the outside of the base’s fence.
The planned installation of the work is key to counteracting the associated clichés. When James made the photograms, he did not align the sheets of paper in the same orientation against the fence. Presented in grids on four sides of a wall, the images are forceful and oppressive. Viewed edge to edge they crackle with energy and immediacy. The experience is disorienting; the barrier feels like it is both advancing and receding. Without an accompanying statement, this project would provoke more questions than answers—on which side is the photographer? Is the viewer looking up or standing squarely in front of it; are they floating? Like his prior work, he taps into feelings of claustrophobia, visualizing the latent histories that continue to linger in the Okinawan landscape.
IMPERIA | THE BENEFACTOR
Conner Green seeks to investigate the social ramifications of monumental architecture through collages of found materials, drawings, and photographs. “I understand ‘architecture’ to refer to more than just the design and decoration of buildings, but also to how thought or action can make order and meaning out of random space,” Green says. "My work, in part, attempts to excavate those embedded meanings." To create his work, Green digitally assembles his materials into sketchy, black inkjet prints that resemble schematic drawings or computer renderings, producing a sense of disorder in the otherwise highly organized and rigid, even scientific, discourse of architecture. The rendered forms do not refer to any extant structures, rather they attempt to portray a kind of typological composite of different built forms throughout history.
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo. He returned to the United States, moving to Houston, Texas, at the age of 15. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Thomas, Houston in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Mr. Nakagawa is the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.
Nakagawa is a recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year, and 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. Nakagawa’s work has been exhibited internationally, solo exhibitions include: Eclipse, PGI, Tokyo (2018); Kai, sepia EYE, New York (2018); OKINAWA TRILOGY: Osamu James Nakagawa, Kyoto University of Art and Design (2013);GAMA Caves, PGI, Tokyo; Banta: Stained Memory, Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan (2009); Kai: Osamu James Nakagawa, SEPIA International Inc., New York (2003).
His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Grand Rapid Museum of Art and others. Nakagawa’s monograph GAMA Cavesis available from Akaaka Art Publisher in Tokyo, Japan.
Conner Green (born 1984) is an artist from Indianapolis, IN. He studied art and literature at Indiana University and received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Much of his work combines disciplines, incorporating found sculptural and print-based elements. His work explores concepts of institutional critique, myth, desire, and master narratives. He finds all of these concepts rife for excavation in the consumer-based material world and the built environment. His process allows for a certain degree of chance or disorder to come into play, which he believes enables the phenomenal world to speak for itself.
“Filmmaker Charles Atlas documents the life and work of Bowery, up to his AIDS-related death in 1994. Part fashion designer, part performance artist, part promoter, Leigh Bowery is a singular creation of his own making. An imposing-looking man even without his often startling, always outrageous costuming, the Australian-born Bowery becomes a legend of the London club and underground art scenes in the 1980s. The film features archival footage and interviews with Bowery’s family and friends.”
1 hr 23 min.
Presented in partnership with LOW PONE. Discussion to follow the screening. Admission is free.
We shape our surroundings at the same time our surroundings shape us. Communities and their environments are inseparable. Yet as we go about occupying, utilizing, and altering our natural and built worlds, how much do we think about the connections we share with the others who inhabit the place we call home?
For his exhibition at Tube Factory artspace, David Schalliol addresses the interdependence of people and place through photographs and video interviews with residents of three geographically and culturally unique places.
First, he explores the very neighborhood in which this exhibition takes place, Bean Creek, a hamlet of homes and businesses on the Southeast Side of Indianapolis. The waterway for which the neighborhood is named has undergone a peculiar evolution as homes, churches, and businesses have grown around it. In some places, Bean Creek flows undisturbed, a trickling rill winding through thickets of gently bending trees. In other places, the creek has been covered by roads and other obstructions, only to remerge more than 100 yards away. The odd evolution of landscape and municipal planning has caused some houses to face the creek—today’s residents enter through the back door, as the front faces nature.
Next, Schalliol takes us to the South Side of Chicago, where since 2011 a tight-knit group of neighbors has watched their community disappear as the owners of a nearby freight yard buy up houses in order to expand their facilities. The few remaining homeowners have banded together to try to preserve whatever is left of this place and its unique culture. The economic powers that are being exerted, however, will likely prove too powerful to bear.
Finally,Schalliol visits former coal mining communities in the north of France. Following decades of economic contraction, the French government ceased all coal mining in the country in the early 2000s. Towns like the one in these photographs must completely re-imagine their future economic and cultural identities. Meanwhile, the visual and social fabric of the region is affected in every conceivable way by its historic attachment to coal. For example, the “spoil tip” hills interspersed throughout the town, created by waste rocks from the mines, now serve as artificial mountains being re-purposed for motorsports and ecological tourism.
Though located worlds apart from each other, the three communities share threads of kinship that hint at possible human universalities.
David Schalliol describes himself not so much as an artist, but as a visual sociologist. He is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College and a principal of Scrappers Film Group. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, and been exhibited extensively. Recent exhibitions include the 2017 Chicago Architectural Biennial, the Belfast Photo Festival, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project. He is the author of Isolated Building Studies. His directorial film debut, The Area, premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April 2018. He earned his BA from Kenyon College, and his MA and PhD in the Department of Sociology at The University of Chicago.
Crashing Through the Front Door is a culmination of photography, essays, and oral histories examining queer life in Indianapolis, Indiana through the lens of once-a-month dance party.
Photographer Casey No and writer Taylor Rose met over a decade before the ideation of this project in southern Indiana. Though the town was small, and seeped in rural midwestern tradition, the two found a group of LGBTQ friends who were a safe haven. In fact, Casey was the first person Taylor came out to at the age of 16. Both have developed their individual crafts over the years, talking about doing a collaboration for several of them. When Low Pone, an Indy-based queer dance party, came to life the subject matter was clear -- the two would chronicle the lives of their queer community as it intersected over one night every month.
No and Rose are capturing a rare and novel movement in queer Indianapolis. One where much of the LGBTQ community is hungry for inclusion of all races, genders, non-genders, and expressions. On a sociological level, they are examining the need for public celebration of holistic queer existence by showing the vibrancy that comes from a space where the queer community can unapologetically show their identities. Low Pone is doing something that’s outside the norm in this city: It's creating a space for those who have felt displaced. Crashing Through the Front Door is documenting what they view as a historical queer moment of creation and community.
Over the last eight months, dozens of people were interviewed about the impact that a small pop-up queer, trans, and people-of-color inclusive space had on their lives. By no means is a dance party the solution or even a delineation of the queer community in Indy, but it does bookmark a moment in time and offers a periscope view into queer life.
The culmination is a story about how that one night becomes a sanctuary, paying homage to the idea of home, to a chosen family, to rising above the fragments that society bends us to fit neatly into their stackable boxes. The photographs and personal narratives illuminate the process of finding triumph in the face of tragedy and refusing to be defined by it, how a chosen family finds one another, grapples with gender, sexuality, and identity in the midst of a cultural movement.
No and Rose consider themselves documentarians and creative culture makers. No is a local musician in the band Spandrels and an award-winning photographer living in Indianapolis. He is interested in closing the negative space between artist, audience, and community. Rose is a non-binary journalist in Indianapolis who has worked as the Arts Editor for NUVO and as the Communications Director for the ACLU of Indiana. Their work has won numerous Society of Professional Journalism awards for social justice and community based content. This relationship between an artist and journalist is collaborative. Both artists have experienced discrimination based on class, gender, and sexuality. They both found power in their perspective mediums by boldy claiming their own identities. This project is not only personal, it is how these artists hope to encourage similar endeavors in the arts community of Indianapolis.
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.
Wear comfortable clothing and join us for a 20-minute live interactive audiovisual performance by the artist: Jan 9, 13, and 21 at 6pm.
Rachel Leigh is an Indianapolis-based graphic designer, electronic musician, and all-around visual tinkerer who spent formative years in Europe. Her intricate, immersive work invokes subtleties of physics, geometry, and history. Leigh is a member of performing art collective Know No Stranger, contributing to numerous original stage shows and multimedia experiences since 2014. Her graphic design work has appeared at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Bankers Life Fieldhouse, and Simon Malls. Light Scheaux is her debut solo exhibition.
Follow her projects at majuscule.co. Follow on instagram @reallyearly.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture.
Among his many publication, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013.
How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into ten languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015.
His new project, The Appearance of Black Lives Matter was published in 2017 as a free e-book, and in 2018 as a limited edition print book with the art project “The Bad Air Smelled Of Roses” by Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope, both by NAME Publications, Miami.
Since Charlottesville, he has been active in the movement to take down statues commemorating settler colonialism and/or white supremacy and convened the collaborative syllabus All The Monuments Must Fall.
A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.
RSVP to info@bigcar.org
Bring your favorite dish and the recipe and join us for The Dinners project. The project is designed to bring together artists, community leaders, and neighbors to explore the role of art in building a strong democracy and imagining a better future. On the weekend of Oct 4-7 people will gather all across the country to break bread and discuss art and democracy. The Dinners Project is a non-partisan initiative of Creative Capital, in partnership with For Freedoms 50 State Initiative and #LoveArmy. Artists have always played a key role in how societies and cultures evolve–now is no different. In challenging times artists can lead the way. This is a time for imagination and vision. This is a time for artists. How can we stand alongside artists in creating change? What role will you play in shaping the future of our country and our democracy?
