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 steeped 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.
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?
For her debut solo exhibition, Laura Ortiz Vega presents a new series of thread paintings inspired by the rhetoric surrounding President Trump's proposed US-Mexico border wall and by her documentation of graffiti in Mexico City, Canada and other cities she had travelled. The exhibit also includes an altar connected to immigrants crossing the desert to America.
Christos Koutsouras, Image 05731, photo and pencil, 50 3/4" x 90"
Deeply rooted in place, Land Art (Telling Trees) was inspired by a large-scale fire that tore apart the island of Samos, Greece — the birthplace of the artist. Koutsouras first approached this theme in 1994 after a fire destroyed much of the vegetation on the island. When a massive fire again hit Samos two years ago, he returned to this theme and finished the work he started 20 years ago. Koutsouras envisions the white trees he painted juxtaposed with the black landscape as a visual reference to the act of fire. He shares that his objective was, from the beginning, to talk into the people's consciousness and show the force of the action. Koutsouras wanted to do more than just create an image. This was a work in progress over several years, starting with a spontaneous reaction back on time.
These connected projects — related to bees, beekeeping, culture, and community — include an outdoor installation and a resulting exhibit developed by Juan William Chávez, an artist and cultural activist based in St. Louis, during his six-week residency at Tube Factory.
Estos proyectos conectados- relacionadas con abejas, la apicultura, la cultura y la comunidad -incluye una instalación por fuera y una exhibición resultante desarrollada por Juan William Chávez, un artista y activista cultural con sede en St. Louis, durante sus seis semanas de residencia en Tube Factory.
Install shot from Jesse Sugarmann: The People's 50, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
The People's 500 was an exploration of the relationship between the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the people of Indianapolis. In October of 2015, Sugarmann chose 100 residents of the Indianapolis community from a pool of applicants to drive two laps in a pace car — the drivers uniting to complete the equivalent of a single running of the Indianapolis 500. Sugarmann and his crew photographed and interviewed each of the drivers, the resulting documentation serving as the material of the exhibition. Sixteen of the drivers were selected as 16 large scale photos, video, and a sculptural piece.
Install shot from Scott Hocking: RCA, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Detroit-based Scott Hocking visited Indianapolis in January 2015 and selected the former RCA Factory at Michigan and LaSalle as fodder for his installation in the main gallery in August of 2016. Hocking spent three weeks in Indianapolis gathering materials from the site, documenting, researching, and creating his installation. He hauled over 100 massive hunks of burned Styrofoam, multiple plastic blobs melted by fires, fragmented fast food signage, nifty anthropomorphic food-character murals, and dozens of other artifacts. He brought this all to Tube Factory. And he worked onsite while living in Big Car's neighboring artist residency home. The resulting installation uses the main gallery as a kind of ceremonial site — the burned Styrofoam mountain could be a dystopian temple or future glacier.
Presentation shot from Ben Valentine's talk, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Ben Valentine is an independent writer and curator studying how technology, media, and politics intersect around the world. He's written and spoken for SXSW, Salon, SFAQ, Hyperallergic, and The New Inquiry, to name a few. Valentine organized several exhibitions on networked culture, including the World's First Tumblr Art Symposium, with Hyperallergic at 319 Scholes, in Brooklyn; and Unmasking the Network for A Simple Collective in San Francisco. He has helped nonprofits and arts organizations on three continents with marketing, bolster their online presence, and organize public events.
Presentation shot from Jillisblack, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Screening shot from Mike Kelly: Day Is Done, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Install shot from Mari Evans: Carl Pope, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Part of the programming with the Carl Pope: Mari Evans exhibition, Tube Factory artspace hosted Jill is Black, a writer, blogger, and facilitator/trainer/lecturer, focusing on issues of Race, Power, and Privilege in modern-day America. She amassed a diverse following via her social media account, @jillisblack–where her social commentary is centered around inner and outer-community hierarchies, the myth of white fragility and other words for racism, the endlessly-pending and highly-exclusive revolution, and dating and relationships through the eyes of social media.
A screening and discussion of Mike Kelley's Day Is Done. We discussed Kelley's techniques for creating psychic distortions and the perceived relationship between the person of the artist and the artistic persona and common concepts related to the Carl Pope: Mari Evans exhibition that was on display at Tube Factory artspace. Day Is Done is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing Goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue by artist Mike Kelley. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical spectacle unfolds as a series of episodes that form a loose, fractured narrative.
Performance shot from Calvin Johnson: First Friday, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Install shot from The Hairy Man, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
As part of the programming with the Carl Pope: Mari Evans, Tube Factory artspace brought Ronaldo V Wilson for a reading and performance. Wilson earned a BA at the University of California-Berkeley, an MA at New York University, and a PhD at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. Discussing poetry's role in the American imagination, especially as a tool to combat powerful, persistent ideas about race, the body, and trauma.
Selector Dub Narcotic is the pseudonym of choice for Calvin Johnson when he is re-mixing records for the Dub Narcotic Disco Plate series, or engaged in spinning records at a party or other literary functions. Drawing largely from a stack of 45 rpm phonograph records, Selector Dub Narcotic is known to mix the genres dancehall, soul, punk, garage, R&B, rock steady, bubblegum and rockabilly with assorted curiosities of the current underground music scene.
Since 1721, newspapers in the United States have shared reports of sightings and interactions with beings we call Bigfoot. In Indiana, these sightings have been reported from as close to Indianapolis as the Morgan Monroe State Forest and continue to occur today. The Hairy Man, a historical cryptozoology exhibit was curated by author and Sasquatch expert Christopher Murphy and organized by Tube Factory artspace curator, Shauta Marsh. The Hairy Man, featured artifacts, stories and evidence of Bigfoot's existence with a focus on the creature as a part of cultural conversations through the centuries. This included an emphasis on the indigenous people of North America. Murphy, who is regarded as one of the top researchers of the history of Bigfoot, originally assembled this collection that contains a 400-pound, 9-foot-tall iron human skeleton, model of a Bigfoot skull, footprint casts, and more.
Performcance shot from Prince Rama, photo by Shauta Marsh.
Potrait form Carlos Rolón/ Dzine: 50 Grand, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Install from Larissa Hammond: The/ a mind the b mind, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Prince Rama is the musical duo of sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson. They have lived in ashrams, worked for utopian architects, written manifestos, delivered lectures from pools of fake blood, conducted group exorcisms disguised as VHS workouts, installed art installations at The Whitney, Art Basel and various galleries across the U.S. This concert was recorded live April 9, 2017, 8 p.m. at our sound art space, Listen Hear.
Before language to Hemingway, from the ancient Sumerians to the Greeks to the modern day, there was the sport of boxing. With the exhibit "50 Grand," Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón/Dzine presented a dually charged exploration of boxing and domestic culture, inspired by the tactility and performative qualities of boxing, and its relationship to contemporary art at Tube Factory artspace. Within the gallery was an installation of paintings and sculptural fabric works exuberant with color, texture, patterns, and experiments in surface that create a visual dialogue between the physical charge of boxing, the garments worn by the fighters, and the artist's own childhood home and upbringing as a first-generation immigrant. A series of custom-made trophies titled "Immigrants/Emigrants" (Symbols and Mementos for the Nuyoricans) occupied the den.
"The/a mind the b mind" was a fully commissioned exhibit, featuring four large-scale paintings by Larissa Hammond and one in collaboration with poet Ariana Reines. The exhibit was several years in the making.The paintings themselves are an exploration in communication using a collective unconscious that Hammond built through her writings alongside conversations with Reines.
Install shot from LaShawnda Crowe Storm/Maria Hamilton Abegunde: Keeper of My Mothers' Dreams, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Install shot from Audrey Barcio: Under Influence, photo by Shauta Marsh.
Performance shot from Julianna Barwick/MAS YSA, photo by Kurt Nettleton.
Keeper of My Mothers' Dreams expanded the dialogues began in Crowe Storm's works Her Name is Laura Nelson and Be/Coming with newly commissioned pieces: Poems, Origin and Sister Song. The writings and libation bowl added new layers to the experiences of remembering words and performances that examine how the abuse, loss, and commodification of one's womanhood and humanity can be transformed through processes that lead to healing and the re-birthing and re/making of identity. Each piece exhibited in Keeper of My Mothers' Dreams was developed with the hands of many.
Heritage is a pressing concern to our generation. Should we allow the past to influence us—are we bound to ancient tools, materials and techniques? Or should we endeavor to make work that is specific to our time, embracing technology and its untested, ambivalent ramifications? If we do, are we at risk of becoming complicit in a catastrophe, or a pale reflection of something fleeting? In her solo exhibition Under Influence at Tube Factory Artspace in Indianapolis, Audrey Barcio explores these questions in a new series of paintings that examines where the heritage of Modernism intersects with the tools of the Virtual Industrial Age. Her starting point for this body of work is the iconic grey and white checkerboard pattern recognized by contemporary digital designers as a symbol for emptiness waiting to be filled. Transforming that virtual nothingness into concrete form, Barcio employs it to empower interpretations of the iconographic legacy of our Modernist forbearers.
2016 Brooklyn experimental artist Julianna Barwick was on tour with the release of Will, her revelatory third full-length album. Conceived and self-produced over the past year in a variety of locations, the ominous, compelling Will is a departure from 2013's Alex Somers-produced Nepenthe. If that last record conjured images of gentle, thick fog rolling over desolate mountains, then Will is a late afternoon thunderstorm, a cathartic collision of sharp and soft textures that sounds looming and restorative all at once.