Big Car

Artist Workshop: Fiber Art and PomPoms with Mary Jo Bayliss
2024-09-25 11:00 - 14:00, 2024-10-12 11:00 - 14:00, 2024-10-19 11:00 - 14:00, 2024-10-23 11:00 - 14:00, 2024-10-25 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | 1 Monument Circle, South Facing Steps, United States
Come to SPARK and join artist Mary Jo Bayliss to learn how to create pompoms and contribute them to her Taylor Swift inspired community artwork titled, “The Village”. Visitors will be able to make pompoms that will be used in Mary Jo’s final piece! Come join in on this collaborative artwork and make sure to stop by the circle later to see the final finished piece when Taylor Swift enters her “Indy era” and performs in Indianapolis!
A statement from Mary Jo Mayliss about this piece:
“The Village” is about the power of women working together to create a better, more equitable society. The iconography and rallying point for the activities is inspired by Taylor Swift, and without her presence in Indianapolis, this community artwork, and its far reaching scope, would not be possible–Thank you Taylor! The 13 elements that compose the artwork will be auctioned off at the end of Taylor’s Eras Indianapolis venue, with proceeds being donated for Arts for Learning, Big Car, and Ivy Tech Art Department, Indianapolis.
Mary Jo Bayliss specializes in creating environments that help people feel at ease using space, light and color to achieve these goals.
We at Big Car are teaming up with Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis — with support from the Capital Improvement Board and the Indiana War Memorials Commission— to spark Monument Circle with human-scale activities like games, live music, artmaking, and socializing in a comfortable place.

Artist Workshop: Pyrography with Nasreen Khan
2024-09-27 17:00 - 19:00 | 1 Monument Circle, South Facing Steps, United States
Pyrography, commonly known as wood burning, is the art of drawing and writing using a burning tool for etching designs onto different surfaces, usually wood.
You can use pyrography to add drawings or writings to wood, gourds, leather, and any other material that wouldn’t be destroyed by the heat from the burning tool.

Khan will talk about the process, give examples and allow attendees to try it out (must sign a waiver).

Indianapolis-based artist Nasreen Khan grew up in West Africa and Indonesia and moved to the gritty American Midwest by way of New York City. She and her toddler son live in their bungalow on Indianapolis’ Near Westside. On a Friday night she can be found cooking various organ meats or chasing down a stellar mint julep.
Her Indianapolis art is all a tribute to Haughville. Since moving to Indianapolis and putting down roots, walking the streets of Haughville and becoming part of the fabric here has kept her grounded. Haughville has been the tableau for building community, exploring her queer identity, motherhood, and teaching her son about race.

We at Big Car are teaming up with Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis — with support from the Capital Improvement Board and the Indiana War Memorials Commission— to spark Monument Circle with human-scale activities like games, live music, artmaking, and socializing in a comfortable place.

SPARK on the Circle is an ongoing partnership between Big Car Collaborative, Downtown Indy, City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, the Capital Improvement Board, and the Indiana War Memorials Commission.

Artist Workshop: Fiber Art and PomPoms
2024-09-28 11:00 - 14:00, 2024-10-16 11:00 - 14:00 | 1 Monument Circle, South Facing Steps, United States
Come to SPARK and join artist Mary Jo Bayliss and her apprentices to learn how to create pompoms and contribute them to her Taylor Swift inspired community artwork titled, “The Village”. Visitors will be able to make pompoms that will be used in Mary Jo’s final piece! Come join in on this collaborative artwork and make sure to stop by the circle later to see the final finished piece when Taylor Swift enters her “Indy era” and performs in Indianapolis!
A statement from Mary Jo Mayliss about this piece:
“The Village” is about the power of women working together to create a better, more equitable society. The iconography and rallying point for the activities is inspired by Taylor Swift, and without her presence in Indianapolis, this community artwork, and its far reaching scope, would not be possible–Thank you Taylor! The 13 elements that compose the artwork will be auctioned off at the end of Taylor’s Eras Indianapolis venue, with proceeds being donated for Arts for Learning, Big Car, and Ivy Tech Art Department, Indianapolis.
Mary Jo Bayliss specializes in creating environments that help people feel at ease using space, light and color to achieve these goals.
We at Big Car are teaming up with Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis — with support from the Capital Improvement Board and the Indiana War Memorials Commission— to spark Monument Circle with human-scale activities like games, live music, artmaking, and socializing in a comfortable place.

Artist Workshop: Fiber Art and PomPoms with Mary Jo Bayliss and Apprentices
2024-10-02 11:00 - 14:00, 2024-10-05 11:00 - 14:00 | 1 Monument Circle, South Facing Steps, United States

Artist Workshop With John Clark
2024-10-11 17:00 - 19:00 | 1 Monument Circle, South Facing Steps, United States
Make Art and Write Poetry with John Clark!
Join Indianapolis-based visual artist, Big Car co-founder and writer John Clark to make drawings, poems, and short stories…or a combination of all three! And we’ll also show you how to make zines, too!
We at Big Car are teaming up with Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis — with support from the Capital Improvement Board and the Indiana War Memorials Commission— to spark Monument Circle with human-scale activities like games, live music, artmaking, and socializing in a comfortable place.
SPARK on the Circle is an ongoing partnership between Big Car Collaborative, Downtown Indy, City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, the Capital Improvement Board, and the Indiana War Memorials Commission.

Artist Workshop: Pyrography with Nasreen Khan
2024-10-18 17:00 - 19:00 | 1 Monument Circle, South Facing Steps, United States
Pyrography, commonly known as wood burning, is the art of drawing and writing using a burning tool for etching designs onto different surfaces, usually wood. You can use pyrography to add drawings or writings to wood, gourds, leather, and any other material that wouldn’t be destroyed by the heat from the burning tool.
Khan will talk about the process, give examples and allow attendees to try it out (must sign a waiver).
Indianapolis-based artist Nasreen Khan grew up in West Africa and Indonesia and moved to the gritty American Midwest by way of New York City. She and her toddler son live in their bungalow on Indianapolis’ Near Westside. On a Friday night she can be found cooking various organ meats or chasing down a stellar mint julep. Her Indianapolis art is all a tribute to Haughville. Since moving to Indianapolis and putting down roots, walking the streets of Haughville and becoming part of the fabric here has kept her grounded. Haughville has been the tableau for building community, exploring her queer identity, motherhood, and teaching her son about race.
What’s This?
We at Big Car are teaming up with Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis — with support from the Capital Improvement Board and the Indiana War Memorials Commission— to spark Monument Circle with human-scale activities like games, live music, artmaking, and socializing in a comfortable place. We’re based from the southwest quadrant in front of the Emmis.

Christen Baker: New! and Impervious to Natural Elements
2024-11-01 18:00 - 2024-12-20 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
New! and Impervious to Natural Elements is an exhibition and gallery activation of sculptural glass, photography, and motion-activated neon lights by artist, Christen Baker. This work explores the complex interplay between our internal and external worlds and examines the aesthetics and structural elements of built environments. Baker’s specific use of glass and light has deep ties to our desires, which fuels her interest in mapping the visceral, physical, digital, and ephemeral experiences of hyper-attention. These materials possess qualities of necessity, utility, optics, and opulence that resonate deeply with our psyches. This work arises from the collision of intuition and observation that Baker experiences daily, and is an evaluation of perception, development and disrepair. This intangible feeling is the foundation for her exploration of the economy of attention and desire, as it relates directly to the necessity for care in our current moment. With this work, Baker articulates the slippage that exists in built environments contributed by exponential growth, surveillance, digital technologies, streams of material use and waste, and the architecture of information hierarchies.
About the artist
Christen Baker is a multidisciplinary artist that explores the intersection of our internal and external worlds. With a BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Glass from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, she merges technology and visual art across mediums like glass, neon, sculpture, 3D rendering and photography. Baker’s work delves into how attention and desire influence material use, space, and information hierarchies. She has completed residencies at Belger Arts in Kansas City MO, The International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemet, Hungary, The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, and received the Leroy Nieman Fellowship in Glass at Ox-Bow School of Art. Recently moved from Philadelphia, PA, she continues to explore the geographies of public spaces and objects, real and imagined, in Indianapolis, IN.
The exhibition is made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Efroymson Family Fund.

Julie Xiao: A Journey
2024-11-01 18:00 - 2025-02-23 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
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.
“I have always been interested in jellyfish because they are mesmerizing creatures,” Xiao said. “They adapt very easily to different environments in the water. They have their own defense mechanisms and are just really beautiful creatures. I was thinking about how many individuals have to adapt to their environments in order to fit in, through that idea the Jellyfish became this anthropomorphic traveler wandering through this natural —yet dystopic and dark — landscape.”
Jellyfish first emerged as a painting when Xiao was working on her BFA in Animation at Ball State University. It hung in her house for a while. Then, while applying to the MFA program at Herron School of Art and Design, Jellyfish reappeared. Xiao was thinking a lot about environmental issues and spiritual symbols in relation to her own journey moving from China to the United States as a child.
By making the character anthropomorphic, it allows for a wider range of interpretations and personal connections. When a character has human-like traits but also embodies other forms, it becomes a versatile symbol that can represent various experiences and identities.
“I was thinking, maybe, in this way, audiences can always interpret and have their own meanings. Or they can relate with the character more. It can embody everyone in a sense,” Xiao said. “Then all these other images emerged, like the orbs in the background. They’re similar to spiritual guides. Drawing from my roots, I think back on how ancestors are there to protect and guide you in life. I also think a lot about roots and trees. That’s why you see a lot of them in the works. Trees tell a lot of history. They are like living time capsules, holding a wealth of historical information within their rings and roots.”
The first large-scale scroll, The Keeper, was inspired by an apple tree from her childhood. And, it led Xiao to create scrolls ranging between 30 and 40 feet long by 4 feet wide. “I would wait for the bus every day under the tree,” says Xiao. “But then, one day, it was suddenly chopped down. I still pass by it sometimes because it’s near where my parents’ restaurant is. You can see it regrowing again. So, I was just thinking about that when I created this tree, it was a landmark in a sense. Trees are like little landmarks of places.”
Xiao creates the pieces on the scrolls by rolling them out a section at a time. And with the work being very detailed, it requires her to use her full body to paint back and forth on the 4-foot wide scroll. The newer pieces in the exhibit are the gouache paintings and the large scale tapestry. These continue her use of auspicious Chinese symbols such as gourds, chrysanthemums, beans, and lanterns.
“Much of my work is inspired by Japanese print and traditional Chinese painting and landscape work. Some works from China and Japan are very similar because they have inspired each other throughout history. A lot of the superstitions, mythologies, and symbolism in the work are from Chinese beliefs and symbols I’ve grown up with,” Xiao said.
Overall, Xiao hopes the audience will find hope, guidance, and optimism in her work — while also acknowledging the difficulty of moving through life and change.
“Everyone’s on this journey to find a place of acceptance. I think a lot of people can relate and identify with that,” Xiao said.“But this work is also a reflection of my life and experience as a multicultural person. I am tethered between two different worlds and identities but not fully embraced by either.”
Xiao’s body of work is meant to challenge and question our perceptions of identity and to consider how our experiences and environment influence who we are. With its unique imagery and symbolism, A Journey invites viewers to engage with the profound and often unconscious forces that shape understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

About the artist: Julie Xiao received her Bachelor of Fine Art degree in Animation in 2019 from Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana) and a Master of Fine Art in Visual Art in 2023 from the Herron School of Art and Design (Indianapolis). As a multicultural artist, she has felt caught in a constant state of displacement and suspension. This has led her to ask several questions through her work like: How is our identity shaped? How do we embrace and accept the different fragments that contribute to our sense of “home” as it relates to our identity? Much of her research centers around how art can be a vehicle to explore our fragmented histories and contemplate where we come from, as well as where we are heading in an ever-changing and uncertain world. Through various visual elements, she explores the ways in which our sense of self is shaped by factors such as society, culture, and history. She works in multiple mediums: digital, oil, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache, but is best known for her use of ink on expansive paper scrolls that pay homage to the rich tradition of Chinese ink painting. Her work is in the Eskenazi Health Public Art Collection and various murals she has painted — such as Chilled Water Cycle, City of Carmel, and Scottsburg —can be found throughout Indiana.

The exhibition is made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Efroymson Family Fund, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Wong Kit Yi: Inner Voice Transplant
2024-11-01 18:00 - 2025-02-23 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Inner Voice Transplant explores the links between subjects as disparate as ancient Egyptian practices of dream interpretation; jiāngshī (Chinese hopping vampires); and the first voice-box transplant, which took place at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998. These inquiries are connected through her signature video essay mode, which incorporates newly composed songs with karaoke-style running subtitles into associative, essayistic narratives. This novel format opens up the videos to viewers’ embodied interactions, something expanded further by her live presentation of a karaoke performance-lecture during FRONT 2022’s opening days, and then at Tate Modern in London as well as M+ Museum in Hong Kong.
The artist has also made a traveling kit that allows other art venues around the world to present a version of the project.
As the artist states, “Ancient temples were the precursors of hospitals, places where body and spirit were meant to be treated together. Modern medicine, however, appears to divorce the concept of treatment from care of the soul.” In her thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, the perceived separation between bodies of knowledge and types of experience are broken down and imagined anew. In the spaces between established genres, Wong considers the question of illness and the need for some to simply live with it rather than heal in the way we are often commanded to do.
About the Artist
Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in recent projects organized by M+ (Hong Kong, 2023); Tate Modern (London, 2023); FRONT Triennial (Cleveland, 2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2021); Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019). She was a resident in the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021) and received an MFA from Yale University. She has taught university courses about performance, video art, and new media and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (New York) in the MFA Fine Arts program. Even when not teaching, she can’t quit lecturing people and continues to do so in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. Wong is currently preparing for a new commission by the Lahore Biennial 03, as well as a co-commission by LIAF 2024 (which is the longest-running art biennial in Scandinavia) and The Kitchen (New York).
This exhibition is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and The Arts Council of Indianapolis and City of Indianapolis.

Benjamin Berg: ░▓ I Can See the Pixels ▓░
2025-01-03 09:00 - 2025-02-23 15:00 | Efroymson Gallery, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Computers do whatever you tell them to, even if you tell them to make a mistake.

There are some seemingly bad ideas behind Benjamin Berg’s exhibition I Can See the Pixels. For starters, everything is created using the 1980s-era GIF image format, which is hated by today’s computer programmers for its limited color palette and inefficient storage. Also, the source images are small and low-resolution. Worst of all, he forces his computer to use colors that are totally wrong, nowhere close to the ones it needs. What’s wrong with this picture?

Berg isn’t interested in doing things the “correct” way. He’s more curious about what happens when you do them incorrectly. He tries to misuse technology just enough to make it misbehave,
but not so much that it breaks down entirely. Finding the right amount of wrong is a delicate balance.

This GIF-based work requires countless screenshots and hours of sifting through those screenshots, cropping and resizing them, looking for the best mistakes, the most interesting failures.

Sometimes they don’t fail hard enough the first time and so he sends them back through for a second pass. Often only a small area is good enough and he crops everything else away. Finally, he takes his favorite failures and blows them up big. The pixels, once tiny and hard to spot, are now on display for all to see.

I Can See the Pixels features prints and large-scale projections of animated GIFs, accompanied by ambient plunderphonic music playing from two sets of speakers.

For more information, to stream/download music, or purchase art prints, visit animalswithinanimals.com/bent

About the artist: Benjamin Berg is a multidisciplinary artist from Indianapolis. After making glitch music for several years, he started applying similar techniques to the visual arts in 2005, documenting his experiments on his blog. His writings from this period culminated in a series of highly influential and widely cited glitch art tutorials.

By making technologies misbehave, his work challenges the assumptions built into those technologies, assumptions which are often unstated and sometimes even unconscious.

He also releases music with his band Animals Within Animals, and solo under various names including stAllio! and Old Man Glitch.

Circle Show
2025-01-03 18:00 - 2025-01-26 18:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
We are kicking off 2025 sharing artworks of some the artists who helped make 2024 SPARK on the Circle happen! Visual artists Katie Faust, Dillion Imel and Sarah Montañez led daily activities of our work in the pop-up park in the Northwest quad for five months. Kris Komakech was one of our SPARK Artists in Residence. He created a Monument Circle Hidden Picture, led a clock-making workshops and more. Read more about the artists below.
Kris Komakech is an Indianapolis based multi-media visual artist who has been practicing his work for over 20 years. He is best known for his intricate maps and community focused clocks. He exhibits in non-traditional venues like grocery stores and community spaces. Komakech has also exhibited at The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Central Library’s Meet The Artists, Gallery 924 and many other traditional galleries and art spaces. “Like most people, I had a very active imagination as a child: I truly lived inside my mind. At a very young age, I recognized my ability to bring all of my dreams and fantasies into the real world through that creativity,” says Komakech.
“Drawing, painting and building were not just simple activities to me — the need to create was similar to the need to breathe, and I inhaled with my eyes and exhaled with my hands. In the sixth grade, I was selected to attend classes at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis — a turning point in my artistic journey. Everybody was older and more experienced than me, and as the little kid with the broken glasses, I’m sure I stuck out in class. Regardless, I never felt more in my own element than in art class. However, during high school, I started neglecting my passion for art and began focusing on the more mainstream pastimes of “normal” teenagers. I thought I was doing myself a favor by trying to fit in, but it turned out to be a strategy that abandoned my overwhelming strengths and uncovered my true weaknesses. I spent the first 16 years of my life building an identity: I was “Kris the Artist.” I knew exactly how to express myself, and I let my hands do all of the talking. But, unfortunately, I then spent twelve long years trying to fit myself into this image of normalcy that I had stuck in my mind. My story turned out to be a really long and difficult way of figuring out exactly who I am not. At the age of twenty-eight and somewhat lost in life, I wandered into my current career as a carpenter. Slowly, my desire to create reemerged. And, once again, I began to trust and believe in my hands. Today, I know them to be my true voice.”
Katie Faust is a queer and non-binary artist located in Indy. They are a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington with a Bachelors in Studio Art and an Art History minor. Their work has been shown in the Indianapolis Art Center in Broad Ripple, Indiana and at Indiana University-Bloomington. Faust’s work focuses on cultivating a sense of self beyond heteronormative expectations surrounding sexuality and gender. Through their exploration of personal identity and acceptance, they aim to create a space that encourages admirers to challenge their perceptions of self and embrace their authentic expression.
Dillon Imel is an Indianapolis-based artist and third-year Illustration major at Herron School of Art. Dillon’s work draws a lot of inspiration from the mundane moments of life.
Sarah Montañez is currently a senior at IU Indianapolis’ Herron School of Art and Design, pursuing a BFA in Photography and a minor in Art History. An image maker and video artist, Sarah explores the tense generational dynamics present in her family, as well as grief, loss, and yearning for people and places.
SPARK on the Circle is a partnership between Big Car Collaborative, Downtown Indy, Inc., the City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, and the Indiana War Memorials Commission, and is funded by the Capital Improvement Board. At Big Car, we approach our work at the Circle as a site- and community-specific socially engaged art and creative placemaking project.
Artwork of SPARK on the Circle by Katie Faust

ASMR Live-Landon Caldwell
2025-02-07 19:00 - 20:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us in the Main Gallery for a live performance of ASMR with artist Landon Caldwell.
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a previously unstudied sensory phenomenon, in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. This sensation is widely reported to be accompanied by feelings of relaxation and well-being. The current study identifies several common triggers used to achieve ASMR, including whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds and slow movements. Data obtained also illustrates temporary improvements in symptoms of depression and chronic pain in those who engage in ASMR.
Landon Caldwell is a multi-disciplinary artist and composer based in Indianapolis. His work explores environment, family, and class, using sound, words, color, and other materials, presenting immersive environments that redirect attention to the present and reveal hidden layers of reality. Landon has toured extensively across the US, Canada, and Europe and regularly collaborates with artists and musicians in the Midwest and beyond, having served time in improvisational units like Eternal Husk, Crazy Doberman, and the Open Sex. With Mark Tester, he curates and runs Medium Sound, a focal point of adventurous music in Indianapolis. Since 2020, he has host free sound art programming, installations, and workshops through Sonic Potluck, a collaboration with Rob Funkhouser. His installation work has been exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Terminal Kyoto, the Indiana State Museum, and more.
This series is part of the exhibit Julie Xiao, “A Journey.” Events in the gallery during this show will center around healing and mediation.

ASMR Live- Rob Funkhouser
2025-02-13 18:30 - 20:00 | IN
Join us in the Main Gallery for a live performance of ASMR with artist Rob Funkhouser.
Doors are at 6:30pm, performance starts at 7pm.
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a previously unstudied sensory phenomenon, in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. This sensation is widely reported to be accompanied by feelings of relaxation and well-being. The current study identifies several common triggers used to achieve ASMR, including whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds and slow movements. Data obtained also illustrates temporary improvements in symptoms of depression and chronic pain in those who engage in ASMR.
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. He holds an M.M. from Butler University in Music Composition, and most recently completed Peace of Mind, Speed of Thought for Classical Music Indy. He has released projects through various labels in three different countries, but finds his home turf on Auris Apothecary and Medium Sound. His current projects include an ongoing series of recordings and writing under the title Walking Music, building a new set of instruments in collaboration with artist Justin Cooper, and ongoing work on new performance tools for music and installations. In 2020, he began a long-term living residency with Big Car as part of their APLR program. He also serves as Education Manager for the Rhythm Discovery Center, where he runs public programming for schools and community members. He has collaborated with diverse groups including Forward Motion, Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, So Percussion, No Exit Theater, and Chicago-based director Ryan Gleason.
This series is part of the exhibit Julie Xiao, “A Journey.” Events in the gallery during this show will center around healing and mediation.

ASMR Live - Sesseka
2025-02-20 18:30 - 20:00 | IN
Join us in the gallery for a live performance of ASMR with artist Jessica Dunn, aka, Sesseka, who will lead an audiovisual meditation experience.

Doors 6:30pm.
Performance 7pm

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a previously unstudied sensory phenomenon, in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. This sensation is widely reported to be accompanied by feelings of relaxation and well-being. The current study identifies several common triggers used to achieve ASMR, including whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds and slow movements. Data obtained also illustrates temporary improvements in symptoms of depression and chronic pain in those who engage in ASMR.
Jessica Dunn (sesseka) is a multimedia artist known for her immersive, dreamlike worlds combining video, sound, and physical installations. With a scientific curiosity, she finds inspiration by investigating the natural world as well as psychological realms of consciousness. Dunn graduated from Herron School of Art + Design with a double major in painting and sculpture. Caught between 2D and 3D practices, she found her calling in 4D art including experimental animation, performance, and experiential works. With a medium-agnostic mindset, Dunn utilizes a wide variety of materials allowing the concept to drive the process. Lately, Dunn has extended her practice into filmmaking including short documentaries and narrative animations. No matter the format, Dunn’s work invites the viewer to open their perception to explore new realms of reality.
This series is part of the exhibit Julie Xiao, “A Journey.” Events in the gallery during this show will center around healing and mediation.

Steven Yazzie and Nancy Baric: The Nearness of Distance
2025-03-07 18:00 - 2025-04-20 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 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.

Jason Wesaw: Sovereign Spirits
2025-03-07 18:00 - 2025-08-25 19:30 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Potawatomi (Turtle Clan) artist Jason Wesaw’s exhibit consisting of sculpture, drawings, prints, and installation is linked to the beliefs of his culture related to land, specifically the ground where Tube Factory now sits. This land has been part of Potawatomi lands at different times in history before the United States existed. For this reason, Wesaw used earth and materials from Terri Sisson Park on the Tube Factory campus to create some of the works in this fully commissioned show.
Tube Factory’s chief curator, Shauta Marsh, looked to Wesaw because she felt his work offers a form of time travel — connecting us to a time before and to the present and ways to envision a future with shared connections and value tied to the land. And, in doing so, Wesaw brings people together today and across generations. “An overarching tenant of my practice is a commitment to examining relationships,” he said. “Relationships act as a guidepost for me, whether it’s connecting to family and community, to spirit and my observations in the natural world, or to materials: those which are considered modern art mediums, or found and harvested materials.”
Two pieces anchoring Wesaw’s Sovereign Spirits exhibit to the place where the Tube Factory sits are the tall flowing installations of shimmering satin and taffeta ribbon.
“They address the way that I interact with the underside of life, the places beneath the surface where spirit moves in subtle and powerful ways that only focused reflection and observation can reveal,” Wesaw said.
Wabshkya Sen or White Stone, is a piece about the help we receive through ceremonies that bring us healing and good health, both physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Bean Creek draws attention to the urban stream just outside the walls of the gallery, where we can be reminded that the cleansing, moving spirit of the water can often be found sharing its life force if we simply pause long enough to let our senses guide us to her flowing banks for a quiet moment.
Wesaw will also create an installation composed of black ash baskets or Gokpenagenek. A quintessential and ancient art form amongst the Potawatomi, black ash baskets are not merely functional or decorative objects, they weave together ancient cultural knowledge about the importance of maintaining relationships to the land and each other with a value system based upon reciprocity.
“These baskets are a reflection of our community’s ongoing presence on this Land and they remain a treasured art form practiced by the Potawatomi and many other Tribal Nations. Many of the baskets on view in this collection were made by ancestors of the Pokagon Potawatomi people of northern Indiana and southwest Michigan, with others having been made by their descendants who now carry on this beautiful, customary art form,” Wesaw said.
The intimate, small-scale oil pastel drawings that line the wall illustrate Wesaw’s process of observation and structure, ideas that often are fleshed out even further in his larger works. The textile pieces from his ongoing Blanket Series explore ideas around the transfer of knowledge that occurs between spirit, nature, and human beings, what he sees as a subtle, gentle ceremony of offerings and giveaways.
In the textile and ceramic works, lies an interest in the power of ornamentation, with materials like dyed deer tail and shiny, small objects drawing your gaze closer into the work. Collectively, the work in Sovereign Spirits shows a wide breadth of materials being used, but there is a united spiritual aesthetic of the pieces, regardless of the time, space and dimension in which they are constructed.
“In a quest for connection and common ground,” Wesaw said. “Where is it you look to find the source which helps you move with meaningful purpose, fulfillment, and Love? With Sovereign Spirits, I hope to take you on a journey where you can explore the power of Self, including the connections we have to the communities around us, the longing we feel to belong, and our desires to understand our place amongst all of creation. As we so casually ask for help or guidance from a higher power in difficult times throughout our lives – we must also understand that when spirit comes looking for something from us – that we need to be ready to give back without hesitation or fear; in essence, to have faith. The work in this exhibition recognizes the role of land, water, and skies as we seek a deeper, clearer understanding of Spirit and Self.”
The exhibition’s title, Sovereign Spirits, resonates with meaning across history. “Sovereign is a word most-often used to describe the undisputed authority of political entities, or to imply supreme power and autonomy. Indeed, this is a word that the Potawatomi — and all Tribal Nations — have become eerily familiar with in our centuries-long fights to maintain our traditional culture and inherent human rights, in a country founded on freedoms for all,” Wesaw said. “By stripping away themes centered around history or distinguishing labels like ‘Indian’ and ‘Native American’, what we may find as those layers are peeled back is a deep awareness of the natural world around and within us, and the connection we have to beings other than humans. In an increasingly fast-changing world where the land and people are being eaten up as a resource, there is a humble acknowledgement we can make in understanding the power of reciprocity and the place Spirit holds in the physical world we are living.”
About the Artist: Jason Wesaw works in an array of media including ceramics, textiles, works on paper, and traditional cultural pieces. His projects relate stories about the Potawatomi people’s ancient and evolving connection to the Land, the Sky, the Water, and Beyond. He balances being an artist with working in his Tribal community as a Peacemaker and participating in traditional cultural ceremonies across the Great Lakes. Wesaw is Potawatomi (Turtle Clan) and lives near the historic Pokagon Potawatomi settlement of Rush Lake in southwestern Michigan. His work is in the permanent collections of the Eiteljorg Museum, Grand Valley State University in Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Indiana State Museum, and many other regional institutions. He was recently a Mellon Artist-in-Residence at the Newberry Library for the ‘Indigenous Chicago’ exhibition and is a core artist in the current “Woven Being” group exhibition at The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.
Learn more about Wesaw by visiting his Instagram account @jasonwesaw.
The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Efroymson Family Fund, the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The show is part of a long term project, Social Alchemy, conceived by Big Car co-founders Shauta Marsh and Jim Walker and artist and philanthropist Jeremy Efroymson, explores historical and contemporary examples of utopian experiments, fictional utopias and dystopias, and social and cooperative-living design projects.
About Tube Factory artspace: Tube Factory is a contemporary art campus and community center. There are four galleries on the campus, two are commissioning galleries. Admission is free. It is also the home base for Big Car Collaborative’s work across Indianapolis and beyond. Tube Factory features rotating exhibits, interactive projects, community space, a reference library, an outdoor gathering space, and much more to find through exploring. Tube Factory is an independent, noncommercial, nonprofit public place.
Tube Factory is run by the 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit, Big Car Collaborative. As an artist-run nonprofit organization, we utilize tools of culture and creativity to build community and social cohesion — connecting people as a way to boost quality of life. We support our community by supporting artists.
Much of our work happens on a single block where we own or co-own more than 20 properties — including a long-term affordable housing program for artists and Tube Factory — a contemporary art museum with a cafe, studios, and community space. At our campus of adaptive reuse buildings and public greenspace, we host community and cultural programs to promote social connectivity, cooperation, and creativity.
We also facilitate people-focused placemaking and place keeping projects across the city and beyond through Spark. Tune in to our experimental, community-focused radio station, WQRT 99.1 FM — also streaming at wqrt.org. Learn more at BigCar.org and TubeFactory.org.
About Indiana and Tribal Land (from the Indiana State website):
There are two tribes that have land in Indiana.
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi received a small portion of their land back from their removal in Indiana. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi is a federally recognized tribe. It is one of 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States. The Bureau of Indian Affairs contacted Chairman John Warren to state that their tribe, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, had been approved on November 18, 2016 to receive 166 acres of land in trust in South Bend, Indiana. The tribe successfully put a few housing units and tribal government buildings to assist their tribal members living in Indiana. It also built a 175,000 square foot and 1,800 Class II gaming devices, four restaurants, a player’s lounge, a coffee shop, two bars, a retail outlet and approximately 4,500 parking spaces including an enclosed parking structure.
The second tribe that has land in Indiana is the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. The tribe was given land to put a Cultural Extension Office for their tribal members living in Indiana to attend specific gatherings, ceremonies and education events at this office located in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
There are approximately 25,000 other tribal members who live in Indiana, from the Apache, Cherokee, Navajo, Comanche, Lakota Sioux, and other federally recognized tribes.
Information via: faqs.in.gov/hc/en-us/articles/360033547051-Are-there-any-Native-American-tribes-in-Indiana

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

NIGHTJAR: Derek Mong
2025-05-21 18:30 - 20:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Derek Mong will begin reading at 7pm.
After Lynch’s reading and a brief break, the open mic will begin.
Open mic prompt: Write a poem about a beautiful catastrophe.
About Derek Mong:
Derek Mong is the author of When the Earth Flies into the Sun (October 2024), The Identity Thief (2018) and Other Romes (2011)—all from Saturnalia Books. A chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Contest. His collaborative translation, The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin—completed with his wife, Anne O. Fisher—received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Prize.
A poet, essayist, and translator, Derek’s work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, At Length, Pleiades, Verse Daily, the Missouri Review, Two Lines, Poetry Northwest, and in the anthology, Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite (2017). He has blogged for Kenyon Review Online, where he wrote a series of Leaves of Grass beer reviews, and written essay-reviews for Gettysburg Review. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Zócalo Public Square and, along with his wife, edits At Length, a literary journal devoted to long work.
New poems and essays have appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the LA Times, Zócalo Public Square, Free Inquiry, Always Crashing, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and the Boston Globe. His latest long poem, “Midnight Arrhythmia,” was published in Action, Spectacle.
An Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wabash College (Crawfordsville, Ind.), Derek holds degrees from Stanford University (M.A. Ph.D.), the University of Michigan (M.F.A.), and Denison University (B.A.). Born in Portland, Oregon and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he currently lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with his wife and son.
@derek_mong
NIGHTJAR creates an inclusive space for all by bringing together spoken-word performers and page-based poets writing in narrative, lyric, and experimental forms. Every third Wednesday, C.S. Carrier and Michelle Niemann host a reading and invite audience members to share their own poetic responses.

Will Higgins: Museum of Fabulosity
2025-06-06 18:00 - 2025-09-21 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
June 6 through Sept. 21 | Guichelaar Gallery at the Tube Factory artspace campus | 1135 Cruft St.
“It’s widely held that Indianapolis is a boring place with a dull, vanilla past.
That notion is wrong.
Yes, the city is a “good place to raise a family” and yes, it’s a “sports capital.”
But it’s also freaky.
People don’t realize this because staid, well-meaning chamber-of-commerce types have swept the weird bits of Indianapolis’ history, the truly interesting and truly human stories, under the rug.
Finally, along comes the Museum of Fabulosity to look under the rug.
Included in this pop-up museum, made to resemble a small-town history museum, are 16 amazing stories, many so strange they may seem made-up. But they are not made up. They are all absolutely true. They are paired with amazing photographs and also fabulous objects that approximate long lost Indy icons — boxing gloves worn by Lou Thomas the night he killed Arne Andersson; the chair Cannonball Adderly tipped back in the night he discovered Wes Montgomery; James Snow’s Panama hat; Jinx Dawson’s skull; Max Emmerich’s spikes…”

— Will Higgins

SOMA
2025-09-05 18:00 - 2025-10-19 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Main Gallery
This exhibition explores the supernatural and ethereal states of somatic responses. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, where soma was a fictional drug used to pacify civilians in a state of existential bliss and disassociation. Exploring the socialized perceptions of figures occupying space, Soma takes on confronting perceived utopia and dysmorphia in this exhibition.
In the works, moments of adolescent innocence are paired with surrealist and folkloric expressions of figuration. Satirically, this speaks to resisting and transcending moments that are out of alignment as people grow; without physically being dismissed.
Featured artists:
Jo Archuleta (Kansas City, Missouri)
Tommy Lomeli (Helena, Montana)
Katherine Looney (Kansas City, Missouri)
October Sharify (Chicago)
Isaac Tapia (Kansas City, Missouri)
Cesar Velez (Kansas City, Missouri)
Guest Curator: Yashi Davalos
Davalos is an Afro-Puerto Rican-Mexican, Atlanta Native, based in New Orleans. Her practice began in the Americana Deep South. She attended HBCU, Savannah State University, where she studied Vocal Performance. Yashi’s curatorial research centers socio-cultural epistemology, the south and the global south, through an interdisciplinary arts praxis.
Davalos was the 2023-2025 curatorial fellow and interim grants and awards coordinator at The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. She was previously a member of collective run gallery The Front New Orleans. Davalos has designed and facilitated programming in collaboration with various institutions including Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Prospect New Orleans, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, UMKC Music Conservatory, and MDW Artist Coalition. Her art has been exhibited throughout New Orleans, ATL, KCMO, and at MECA Art Fair in the Dominican Republic. Yashi’s writing has been published via Sixty Inches From Center, Burnaway, and Intervenxions at Latinx Project NYU.
Artist Bios:
Jo Archuleta (b. Taos, New Mexico 2000) is an artist living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work explores the complexity of identity and mythology of womanhood found within leisure, desire, pleasure and the specificity as a state of being. By acknowledging rules within the landscape of femininity, gender roles and their societal expectations. Archuleta has found that there are multiple approaches to transgressive and transformative definitions of these identities. Her specific approach to this critique has been to use humor, jokes, and satire. Archuleta is interested in exploring how the figure is perceived and how she sees herself, a constant battle between self-awareness and self sabotage. The figures seduce and confront complexities within the vapidness of beauty, vanity, and ego while also using self-consciousness as repulsion. The women in her work wear masks, perform softness, weakness, shallowness, and confidence; all while cowering within their own insecurities.
Tommy Lomeli (b.1993) is an emerging ceramic artist born in Stockton, California. Lomeli holds a BA from CSU Sacramento and an MFA from the University of Kansas. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the International Sculpture Center’s 2024 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award, and first place at NCECA’s 2023 National Juried Student Exhibition. He was a 2024 Charlotte Street Foundation Artist in Residence. He is currently a 2025 Taunt Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation.
Katherine Looney (b.1989 (she/her)) is a Black and Native American visual artist living in Kansas City, Missouri. She usually works with oil paints when creating colorful portraits. Many of her works are based on photos she has taken of her friends and family. She was a part of Charlotte Street Foundation’s 2023 Artist INC cohort. She was also a 2024 recipient of Charlotte Street Foundation’s Artboards Award. Katherine has a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
October Sharify (b.1999) is an oil painter based in Chicago, Illinois. Their longtime interest in history and theology blends in their work with feminine aesthetics and spiritual imagery. October has a developmental disability and believes that this is both a detriment to their work and integral to their process. October has an African American and Persian cultural background, and often turns to the visual language of their respective cultures’ past for inspiration. “I enjoy working with a limited palette, and I mix my own custom colors to use consistently across my work. Blue to me is a very atmospheric color and my favorite time of day has always been twilight. World-building and paintings that evoke a feeling are very important to me and this exists in every piece that I make.”
Isaac Tapia was born in Mexico, where he lived until moving to the U.S. when he was nine. Isaac focuses on portraits that elevate important, yet often underrepresented, members of his community and celebrate the complex narratives of contemporary migration. He blends photography, audio interviews, and traditional oil portraiture techniques to convey rich, multilayered stories and create opportunities for identification and connection. Isaac’s paintings have been exhibited throughout Kansas City — including at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art — and his work has traveled in shows across the Midwest with the Mexican Consulate and La Onda and the M.A.S.A. Collective. He had a residency and exhibition at Casa Lu Sur en Mexico City in December of 2024. Isaac is a founding member of the M.A.S.A. Collective, and is one of the resident artists at the Charlotte Street Foundation. He is also one-half of the mural duo IT-RA Icons, which has painted murals across the country.
Cesar Velez is a self-taught painter and first-generation immigrant from Mexico based in Kansas City, Missouri. Velez’s work draws from his personal experience growing up in the South and Midwest United States as an undocumented immigrant (now DACA Recipient) living amongst American peers.
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Efroymson Family Fund.
IMAGE: Big Fish, Cesar Velez, oil on canvas, 24×30, 2022

Keren Cytter: Rose Garden
2025-09-05 18:00 - 2025-11-02 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Video Gallery
Cytter’s short 2014 film explores the unsettling duality of American culture’s ideals regarding being protectors of life and harbingers of death. This title is a reference to both the 1964 Joanne Greenburg book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which deals with mental illness and the 1971-84 Marine Corp recruitment campaign “We Don’t Promise You A Rose Garden.” These references are meant to clue the viewer in that the seemingly ordinary setting hides a distorted reality. As the tension builds, multiple guns and disjointed conversations between characters escalate the sense that the calm is about to be shattered. A chaotic shooting spree unfolds against the backdrop of normal daily life. The chilling final scene serves as a grim conclusion addressing violence and its pervasive presence within American culture.
Run time: 8 minutes and 55 seconds
Please note: This work contains adult themes and gun violence that some may find triggering.
About the artist
Keren Cytter (b. 1977) creates films, performances, drawings and photographs on topics of social alienation, language representation, and the function of individuals in predetermined cultural systems through experimental modes of storytelling and human perception. Mostly characterised by a non-linear, cyclical logic Cytter’s films consist of multiple layers of images; conversation; monologue, and narration systematically composed to undermine linguistic conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. Recalling amateur home movies and video diaries, these montages of impressions, memories, and imaginings are poetic and self-referential in composition. The artist creates intensified scenes drawn from everyday life in which the overwhelmingly artificial nature of the situations portrayed is echoed by the very means of their production.
Cytter was awarded the Joseph Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021), Absolut Art Award, Stockholm (2009), Ars Viva Prize, Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft, Berlin (2008) and the Bâloise Art Prize at Art Basel (2006).
Recent solo exhibitions include Hot Lava Night, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany (2023); Double Standard, LLS Paleis, Antwerp, Belgium (2023). Cytter’s work was showcased in a major survey exhibition at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (2022), featuring: films, soap operas, plays, sculptures, drawings, novels, zines, life coaching guides, children’s books and a festival. Cytter’s videos were shown in solo exhibitions at Winterthur Kunstmuseum, Winterthur (2020); Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2019); Museion Bolzano, Bolzano (2019), Künstlerhaus – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014); State of Concept, Athens (2014), Tate Modern, London (2012), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011); München Kunstverein (2011); Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); X Initiative, New York (2009); Le Plateau Paris, Paris (2009), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008), MUMOK Vienna, Vienna (2007); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich (2005) and Kunst-Werke Berlin, Berlin (2006).
Keren Cytter’s work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions such as MOMENTUM 10, Momentum Biennial, Moss (2019); Masculinity, Düsseldorf Kunstverein, Düsseldorf (2019); SUR/FACE: Mirrors, Museum Angewandtekunst, Frankfurt, (2017); Instructions for Happiness, 21er Haus, Vienna, State (in) Concepts, KADIST, Paris (2017), Vision on Vision- Lemaitre video collection, SEMA Museum, Seoul (2017); Busan Biennial, Busan (2016); Creating Realities – Encounters Between Art and Cinema, Pinakothek der Moderne and Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); Political Populism, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); John Bock, Keren Cytter, Paul Pfeiffer, Gillian Wearing and Akram Zaatari, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2013); Expanded Cinema, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2011); Videonale 13, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2011); Found in Translation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2011); Morality, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Revolution, van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2010); Scenväxlingar / Scene Shifts, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2010); 8th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Future Generation Art Prize: 20 Shortlisted Artists, PinchukArtCentre Kiev (2010); Time Out of Joint: Recall and Evocation in Recent Art, Whitney Museum, New York (2009); The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009); Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2009); Fare Mondi 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, (2009); VideoZone: Video Biennale, Tel Aviv (2008); Shifting Identities, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2008); Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama, (2008); Torino Triennale, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli (2008); Television Delivers People, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); The Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2007); The first Hertzelia Biennial, Hertzelia (2007); The 9th Lyon Biennial, Lyon (2007); All Hawaii Entrees/Lunar Reggae, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006).
Her films have been screened in numerous film festivals such as The Wrong Movie, Berlinale, Berlin, Germany (2024); Villae film festival, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Bolzano Film Festival, Bolzano (both in 2019); European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck (2018); A Retrospective at Bergamo Film Festival, Bergamo (2016); Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam and KunstFilmBiennale Köln, Cologne (both in 2009); Berlin International Film Festival, Expended Forum, Berlin (2008); Berlin International Film Festival, Expended Forum, Berlin and Glasgow Film Festival, Glasgow (both in 2007).
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

JON MUELLER + TOM LECKY: ALL COLORS PRESENT
2025-10-06 19:00 - 21:30 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Tickets are $7 and can be purchased at the door
A sound and visual meditation
Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. Paired with Tom Lecky’s photographs, it becomes a deliberate focus on form, shape and detail. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.

​​An apt reference point resides within the broad, decades-spanning catalog of Table of the Elements. Like Tony Conrad’s surging Outside the Dream Syndicate, the aural and conceptual headwinds are real, but the perceived affronts of provocation are not. These works are not endurance challenges, nor are they threadbare minimalist upholstery. They are not obstacles. They are invitations. Within their simplicity and formalism await a sympathetic repose, a comfort. These are gestures of generosity.

Mueller studied jazz drumming with Hal Russell at Columbia College in Chicago, and singing with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in New York. A prolific performer, he tours extensively and has appeared at festivals and venues throughout the United States, Canada, England, Europe and Japan.

In addition to his solo work, Mueller has collaborated and performed with groups such as Mind Over Mirrors, Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and Pele. He has also worked with artists including Olivia Block, Aaron Turner, Faith Coloccia, Dawn Springer, Chris Hefner, Jason Kahn, Hal Rammel, Asmus Tietchens, Z’EV, Rhys Chatham, Jarboe, James Plotkin, Duane Pitre, and Raymond Dijkstra. He has released music on renowned labels such as Table of the Elements, Type Recordings, Important Records, Taiga Records, SIGE Records, and American Dreams.
www.rhythmplex.com IG: @jonmueller

Tom Lecky has worked in photography, music (as Hallock Hill), the book arts, prose and poetry writing, and literary criticism. His creative work concentrates on memory, place, and environment, the work of the imagination, perception, and the intersections of abstraction and representation. He often interweaves appropriated texts and images with his own, evoking a conversation with the history of book design and illustration.

These creative pursuits are linked to Tom’s career as an internationally recognized expert in the field of rare and antiquarian books and manuscripts. He has worked in the auction world – notably in a 17-year run as a specialist and Head of Christie’s New York Books and Manuscripts Department – and as an advisor to collectors and institutions. He is the owner of Riverrun Books, and the founder of the rare book and manuscript appraisal and advisory firm Lecky Art Group. www.tomlecky.com
IG: @tom.lecky
