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D. Dominick Lombardi
Joseph Delaney, The Artist Party, 1941 ââ¬â 1943. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. Gift of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Indianapolis Chapter and Mr. Kim Anderson and the Estate of Hermine Floch by exchange.
With its famous Speedway, the once champion Colts, and the popular Pacers, Indianapolis is first and foremost a sports town. What most do not know is that Indianapolis has an art scene–albeit limited–with one world-class institution, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), as its core. At the IMA, you will find a number of stellar art objects ranging from Asian and African antiquities to formidable examples of modern and contemporary art from Europe and the United States. For one, they offer one of the Ecce Homo, c. 1510 paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, which features a relatively calm Christ before of a mob, populated with the typical Bosch crazies. It is wonderful to see a work of this caliber–the multilayered narrative, the expressive faces, the brushwork, and the color–all working in the kind of harmony unique to Bosch. And I’ve never seen this particular painting in a book or magazine, as I found it a bit more intimate than the others of the same subject. Nearby, a work attributed to The School of Bosch, which is fractured-looking, compared to the master’s work, is filled with Bosch-like references, especially those of poor souls in various stages of extreme torture. One could really go to school on these two works.
The IMA also offers a series of changing contemporary shows. Three of the six shows featured during my visit were Omer Fast: Godville, Ingrid Calame: Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Adrian Schiess: Elusive. It seems as though Schiess’ intent is to offer these large, flat, and highly polished works on the floor, and leaning against the walls throughout the museum as ponderous, or perception-altering objects. Nonetheless, I must admit these works left me a bit flat. I understand the intent to play off the variously colored reflective surfaces, which captured the surrounding works and windows. But I am not sure that the work, displayed the way it is, is an interesting, or different enough way to hold most visitor’s attention. However, I suspect this work, and the artist’s intention would be more compelling and successful if these works were installed in anything but a museum. I would enjoy more seeing them placed in a more crowded or common place, like a subway or bus station. This would give the work’s reflective element a more covert and subconscious effect, while reaching a group of people that may really need to stop and smell the roses.
On the other hand, I very much enjoyed seeing Calame’s show, which ranged from her more familiar work—intricate and fluid color pencil tracings that show the passage of time through her outlining of various human and machine made marks, to her less familiar work—the far more dense and vibrant enamel paintings on aluminum. These enamel works, unlike the shallow fields of the drawings, were incredibly deep in field, while the occasionally eye-popping color combination fluttered my vision. I particularly enjoyed the combination of the two different media, and how they intermingled with each other without confusing the artist’s intention to make us aware that there is always more than meets the eye.
I thought the most powerful of the 3 featured shows that I mention was Omer Fast’s Godville, 2005—a 2-channel video projection of various excerpts from video interviews made at Colonial Williamsburg. Fast takes the responses that interviewees made “in character” and in costume, then heavily edited and reassembled those responses with quotes that reflected the participants observations of the contemporary world. The result, a wonderful video of somewhat insane sounding ramblings, will surely reorient your thinking.
The two smaller museums in Indianapolis: (iMOCA) the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and (MiCO) the Midwest Museum of Contemporary Art, both exist due to the efforts and generosity of Jeremy Efroymson, who is the former Executive Director of iMOCA and currently the Executive Director of MiCO. During my visit, the nomadic MiCO featured a group show titled Backyard: A Look at Suburban Backyard Living, while iMOCA offered an Adam Pendleton solo exhibition entitled Rendered in Black + Events Are.
Backyard, which was the inaugural show curated by Scott Grow, is currently housed at the Harrison Center for the Arts since MiCO is still in search of a permanent home. The exhibition features the work of 11 artists who range in media from video and mixed media sculpture to drawing. Macha Suzuki shows us a somewhat sinister side of the backyard denizen–the squirrel, drawn wearing Nacho Libre masks. Here, the otherwise shy arboreal rodents appear aggressive in a comical sort of way, while they also point to issues of class and culture. Brian McCutcheon also addresses culture, but in a more suburban, ritualistic way through up-kept lawns and high-octane Bar-B-Que grills. Nevertheless, McCutcheon hits the pop cultural nail on the head with his biker aesthetic sculpture titled Trailer Queen II, 2001, which is comprised of a flame painted, piston popping, chrome exhaust sporting grilling machine, while the color photo of a yellow sprinkler in the equally pristine Lawn (August), 2001 could also be a certain homeowner’s dream.
Rachel Hayes offers her commentary on the childhood fantasy of camping out in the family backyard with a multi-colored, fancy fabric tent. This work reminded me of one artist I have written about in the past, Shinduk Kang. A Korean artist who takes off cut fabrics that are traditionally used as gift-wrapping (POJaGI) and reuses them to create festive wall hangings. But here, Hayes takes a more American approach by referencing the art of quilt making by interspersing layers of heavily patterned patches, making a very inviting and cozy corner of the universe. David A. Parker also plays with fantasy, albeit an absurd one, in his now familiar series of trampoline employing, Sunday daredevils. In an attempt to fly like a super hero, these suburbanites, as represented by the artist in jogging attire, end up looking strangely impotent. In 2 newer works, Parker goes even further with far-reaching fantasy by using escape sections in lawns, or floating kite shaped exit doors that seem to lead to another dimension.
In her nuclear family series, Yoon Cho projects the American dream of a backyard oasis surrounding it with kids and toys through yellow silhouettes over color photographs and videos. For Cho, you never get the idea that any of this will come to fruition, yet, by doing the silhouette overlays, viewers might get the feeling that all of it is merely a distraction, or an interruption, to a calm, peaceful, and fulfilling creative existence. Chris Doyle’s video, The Way Our Story Unfolds, 2003 is a B-movie type stop motion animation that shows how a garden hose can invade the normally secure space of a piece of lawn furniture. The personification of the hose, and the response of the folding lawn recliner is creepy fun for the whole family.
The artist collaborative Simparch offers two works: Post Modern Lawn Ornament in the form of a minimally painted found, hardened bag of cement; and Fountain, a satellite dish water fountain that actually works. In both instances, Simparch reintroduces some of the most banal objects one could think of in a very clever, and elevating way. Chris Vorhees also toys with the common lawn furniture form by reassembling old parts in very new ways. The results are far reaching forms that demand contemplation and respect from the standpoint of architecture and design. Further down the Minimal/Conceptual road is the work of Emily Kennerk. She offers three small green felt and thread pieces that are collectively untitled. Here, we see reference to those subtle variations in the flat lands of the Midwest that are best seen from an airplane, creating a mild feeling of vertigo. Meredith Allen’s melting ice pop photographs, and Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s pictures of children at play round out the field with childhood memories that reference unchanging realities.
Over at iMOCA I found numerous, round cornered black ceramic boxes, fragmented writings as portraits on large silk-screened canvases, and two small, appropriated black and white images, also silk-screened, making up Adam Pendleton’s exhibition titled Rendered in Black + Events Are. The numerous 10-inch black squares that look like blank dice are entitled Muse and Drudge (Rendered in Black). This work has a very 60s Pop look, as it defines the space in a very playful way, while the artist achieves a certain mathematical or geometric presence that looks something like furnishings in a futuristic waiting room. And if you can figure out where to sit, there is no need to see the psychiatrist. There is another emotional element here that probably has something to do with the fragility, one assumes, of the flat-sided ceramic forms the artist employs which increases this work’s subtle intensity. Reading, the large paintings that appropriate previously unrelated bits of writings to create a portrait of the author reminded me of the video by Omer Fast who also created a new, and more to the point representation of his subject.
The two smaller wall pieces, Events Are, are also appropriated. But this time, they are images culled from old catalog looking text that refer to what was once current thinking. In one, we see a section of a Laszlo Moholy-Nagy painting, and in the other, an absurdly designed leap frogging train giving us a span of thinking that is quite compelling.
