Big Car

Steven Yazzie and Nancy Baric: The Nearness of Distance
2025-03-07 18:00 - 2025-04-20 15:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Jeremy Efroymson Gallery
“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. Vacillating between testimonies from Indigenous community members and archival audio bytes of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969, the piece creates a tension between power structures, sacred knowledges, and the struggle between living in balance with the natural world and the relentless march of colonial progress through the mechanism and machinations of capitalism – pushing humanity to reach new heights at the expense of the natural order and health of the world.
Yazzie focuses in on the devastating impacts that uranium and its mining have had not only on Indigenous communities, but on the environment writ large, linking uranium to Indigenous cosmologies and histories – referring to the chemical element as an invisible monster. The development of uranium extraction and its weaponization forced/es a wedge between traditional ways of living, replacing a way to live with a colonial sickness that poisons the land, pollutes the water, and creates a level of radioactivity within the consciousness. When Yazzie writes “My child, what I am dressed with is what you are dressed with. I am your home and mother and father,” in the fourth and final verse of his poem, he reminds us that what we do to the earth, to our mother, our father, we do unto ourselves. A caution that the monsters we awaken cannot be put back into slumber.
The idea of monsters and the monstrous continues in the 2021 film by Nancy Barić, Electric Water. The film creates a pastiche of memory, histories, and connection – looking at her own heritage and ancestral arrival to North America from the Adriatic Sea and the origin stories and cosmologies of the Haudenosaunee and their connection to Niagara Falls. Barić illuminates the power of water, in natural understandings, capitalistic understandings, and spiritual understandings. In tying her connection to place, Barić speaks of Nikola Tesla, whose shared country of origin as her families also creates a binding of herself and her genetic memory to the site of Niagara. Tesla’s invention and design of the first hydro-electric power plant at the Falls, which he envisioned for good and to provide power for free to the people, was corrupted by the long tentacles of capitalism. Capitalism and its reach exist like a mutant creature – distorting, corrupting, and poisoning what it touches.
In the film, Barić interviews Rick Hill, a member of the Haudenosaunee community – who grew up near the Falls. Hill shares portions of the Nation’s story of origin, talking about the Creator and his malevolent brother known as Flint. For every good thing the Creator brought into being, Flint would create a wicked counterpart, monsters. During a time of duel between the brothers, they threw and thrashed each other around cataclysmically shifting and shaping the landscape, which Hill believes is what molded the Falls in its current form. To counteract the monsters of his brother’s making, the Creator brought to life Thunder Beings, that with the clap and shock of their existence, drove the monsters back into the ground; Beings which left the Falls when tourism took over – heading west to the Rockies – returning to bring rain every season. The film illuminates the severed connection to culture through colonial abuses and extractive methodological approaches to ‘progress.’ Through the commercialization of the natural world, the spiritual connection is cut – fissured in ways that create barriers to the holy relation to place. Barić and Yazzie show the fissures that occur when the pollution, extraction, and forced control over the earth take over, urging a return to the stories and power of living in balance.”
–Eric Joyce
Steven Yazzie — Mountain Song (11 mins) Mountain Song is part of a series of video/film installation work exploring Diné/Navajo sacred mountains. Structured in four verses, the film explores indigenous knowledge, mystery, resource exploitation (uranium), and post-colonial reflections on community life. Conversations I recorded with elders, friends, and community members are set against the backdrop of a personal journey to a sacred Diné/Navajo mountain, Dibé Nitsaa, in southern Colorado, eventually ending at a mountain outside my backyard where I once lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Concurrently throughout the film, the radio chatter of the first humans landing on the Moon in 1969 (Apollo Mission) can be heard. The intersection of moon landing audio, indigenous stories, and aerial views of tribal territories echo memories of our shared histories while complicating the experience of the perpetual outsider with subjective indigeneity.
Nancy Baric — Electric Water (25 mins), an experimental documentary and a meditation on the poetics and politics of water, moving between my heritage from the Adriatic Sea and the Haudenosaunee perspective on Niagara Falls. While our connection to water is disrupted by pollution, dams, and the tourist’s gaze, there are stories and insights that lead back to water’s power and teachings.
Steven and I met and quickly realized there was a shared world view especially regarding our relationship to land and water. I feel that the two films speak to each and offer a great opportunity to provide a dialogue due to commonality from an Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspective and one of which also extends to the audience. The two films explore issues of representation, ecology and stewardship, and are examples of connection/disconnection due to colonialism. The films together also offer hope for a better future through mutual care.
Steven Yazzie — is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, video/film, and community collaborations. His work explores the complexities of post-colonial indigenous identity and an ever-evolving community relationship, with a fundamental view that land is the source of life, story, conflict, and healing.
Nancy Baric is Montreal-based artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of cinema and installation. Her practice explores the relationship between ecology, human perception, and intuitive procedures.

Flore Laurentienne at Tube Factory artspace
2025-03-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Flore Laurentienne is performing at Tube Factory artspace on Wednesday, March, 26, 2025 from 7-9pm EST.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased HERE via Eventbrite.
In addition, Indianapolis composer and instrumentalist Rob Funkhouser will open the concert.

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.
Following the compass and critical acclaim of his Volume I debut, Flore Laurentienne returned in October 2022 with Volume II to resume his voyage into environment and emotion. Recorded with string and clarinet ensembles along with Gagnon’s signature modulation, Volume II explores forces of water as metaphorical markers to navigate passages of life and loss, . Reflecting the parallel tenors of nature and humankind, Volume II locates another estuary in Flore Laurentienne’s tides toward contemporary sonic romanticism.
In his approach to composition hued by leitmotif and constraint, Gagnon challenges himself to extract beauty from simplicity in homage to the changing faces of natural landscapes. The presence of familiarity and flux in Volume I is heightened through the vivid instrumentation of a fifteen-piece string orchestra, which Gagnon brings together with an array of 1960s and 70s synthesizers, including the Minimoog Model D, the EMS Synthi and combo organs – an innately ambitious project which forges the composer’s distinctive path in the expansion of classical music archetypes.
Flore Laurentienne was nominated in seven categories at the 2020 ADISQ in Québec, winning the ‘Arrangement of the Year’ and ‘Sound Recording and Mixing of the Year’. In 2020, Volume I was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize and received four nominations at the Felix Awards for ‘Revelation of the Year’, ‘Songwriter of the Year’, ‘Critic’s Choice Album of the Year’ and ‘Instrumental Album of the Year’. In 2021, Flore Laurentienne was nominated for the** Juno Awards** ‘Instrumental Album of the Year’ in recognition for his contribution to Canadian music. In addition, Fleuve No. 1 opened the Chanel fashion show at Paris Fashion Week 2022.
Awards & Recognition
Nominated at the 2021 JUNOS Awards for Instrumental Album of the Year
Nominated on the 2020 Polaris Prize Short List for Volume 1
Winner at the 2020 ADISQ for Arrangement of the Yearfor Volume 1
Winner at the 2020 ADISQ for Sound Recording and Mixing of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Best New Artist
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Album of the Year – Critic’s Choice for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Author or Composer of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Revelation of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Songwriter of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Album of the Year – Instrumental for Volume 1

Rob Funkhouser is a composer, performer, and instrument builder who can never quite sit still. His work is concerned with ideas of place, memory, and pattern and he is interested in interrogating the interstitial spaces between established genres.

Ben Hall: Trunk Rattle Sound Bath
2025-05-02 18:00 - 2025-06-15 17:00 | IN
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.”
With this new body of work, Hall focuses on not just what is played or heard, but what is felt, what is transferred through vibration, what buzzes and rattles in the body long after the source has passed. The body is a resonant shell for the vibrations that occur all around us. “The 17th-century Dutch physicist Christian Huygens observed the entrainment of pendulums,” Hall explains. “He noted in 1655 that if two pendulum clocks were placed near each other, they would synchronize. They wanted to be in rhythm with each other — but it was, and is, not instant. That move toward synchronization, toward harmony… The experience of rhythm, of immersion in sound, of allowing your body to be an entire resonating chamber is to allow that process to begin each time — and allow for the vibration to be you.”
Inspired by the mbira, a traditional African thumb piano with metal tines and built-in buzzers used in spiritual ceremonies to connect with ancestors, Hall draws a throughline from West African sonic cosmologies to Midwestern street corners. “Those buzzes are supposed to be the actual frequencies that cut through to the ancestors,” he says. “The consequence of the sound is what communicates with another world.” In this way, the sound bath is not a cleansing ritual in the New Age sense, but a full-bodied immersion in histories.
Hall makes the connection between the mbiras of tradition and the trunk rattle of modernity. “When you are at the red light next to the Buick,” Hall says, “you’ll notice that the rattling and buzzing is not consistent with the rhythm created by the bass frequencies coming from the vehicle. Often, it will seem that the rattling of your windows — a different distance, a different material from the sound maker — is not even related at times to the rhythm, as though the frequencies you’re hearing in the passing vehicle are somehow coincidental to the vibration in your home.”
Trunk Rattle Sound Bath invites visitors to consider rhythm not only as musical but as a way of knowing, of feeling, of remembering. “When a frequency, a sound (but also a rhythm, a repetition) occurs to us at a different frequency than the one we live in,” Hall says, “we are receiving energy. Frequency is just another way to say energy.” Whether through sound, image, or movement, Hall’s work opens a space for that energy to circulate — and for the body, buzzing like a loose antenna, to receive it. “Vibrational frequencies are in everything,” Hall declares.
About the artist: Ben Hall is an artist and composer based in/from Detroit, Michigan. He was profiled in Fred Moten’s 2017 book, Black and Blur and frequently works as a critic and essayist with a research focus on the visionary American composers Milford Graves and Bill Dixon. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College from 2018-2022. He has presented prints, drawings, film, sculpture and works for sound in numerous exhibitions including the solos Jives & Gambles at Essex Flowers in NYC and Slow An Alarm Until It’s A Tone at MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). He is currently compiling material for the forthcoming publication, A Black Liberation Music Guide.
Curator: Landon Caldwell
Live performance: June 8, 12pm by Hall’s ensemble, Oceanic Beloved.
This exhibition is made possible by the Indy Arts Council and the City of Indianapolis, the Indiana Arts Commission, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Efroymson Family Fund.

Sketch Club with India Hines
2025-05-07 15:00 - 17:00 | IN
If you love sketching and are looking for community, come hang out and draw with our longterm artist in residence, India Hines.
India Hines, a self-taught artist from Denver, CO, and raised in Indianapolis, IN, uses ink, watercolor, and oil paints to explore spirituality and the subconscious. Their intuitive process results in figurative faces and organic shapes that reflect a journey of growth, resilience, and love. India’s art is deeply meditative, rich with emotional depth, and narrates stories of overcoming adversity. Active in community projects and exhibitions, India believes in art’s power to unite and continues to push creative boundaries while exploring personal growth and self-discovery
