Big Car

Stephanie Williams: Common Matter
2026-02-06 18:00 - 2026-02-18 15:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Guichelaar Gallery | Feb. 6 – 18, 2026
Stephanie Williams’ exhibition Common Matter brings together ceramic wall sculpture and framed photography to trace the repeating structures that appear across nature and human design. The show includes modular ceramic forms that shift between geometric and organic designs, alongside photographs which explore cosmic patterns at the microscopic level. Across mediums, the work invites viewers to look closely at how familiar patterns emerge at different scales, from crystalline structures to engineered surfaces.
Williams explores the idea that the universe is built from recurring visual and mathematical “rules” that show up in both organic building blocks and artificial systems. The work considers proportion and measurement as a universal expression of those “rules” (including spiral and growth patterns associated with the Fibonacci sequence) and asks how the macro and the micro mirror one another.
This body of work is informed by diverse influences, from historical cosmologists such as Johannes Kepler to Williams’ daily encounters with the patterns embedded in the world around her. Over time, she has become increasingly interested in how micro-patterns replicate themselves in both large and miniature form, and how humans often echo these same micro-patterns in their design, technology, and impulse to create.
Williams’ studio practice is rooted in ceramics, using a combination of throwing, handbuilding, and slipcasting. The photographic work extends the investigation of her exhibition’s thematic concepts through digital microscopic imagery and black-and-white analogue film.
Ultimately, Common Matter asks viewers to reflect on their existence within the universe and their relationship to it at a fundamental structural level. In the spirit of Carl Sagan’s observation that humanity is “a way for the universe to know itself,” the work suggests that the patterns we notice (and the ones we recreate) are not separate from us, but part of what we are.
About the artist
Stephanie Williams is an Indianapolis-based artist in Big Car Collaborative’s CAMi Long-Term Artist Residency program. She graduated from the Herron School of Art and Design in 2019 and has exhibited in a variety of spaces and galleries across Indiana. Williams has worked at American Art and Clay Company (AMACO) going on ten years.

Blue Blood: Félix Labisse's Goddesses, Demons, and the Space Between
2026-02-06 18:00 - 2026-03-15 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Friday, Feb. 6 – Sunday, March 15 | Tube Main Gallery
French Surrealist Félix Labisse created something strange starting in the 1960s: a universe where women pilot impossible machines through realms that don’t follow normal physics. His iconic blue women — the “Selenides” — are warrior goddesses. And they’re navigating more than space. They move through desire, mythology, and what might be parallel dimensions of time.
On the south wall of the gallery are three pieces from Labisse’s Selenide series: La Femme avec un couteau (The Woman with a Knife), La Reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba), and Judith, referencing the stories and myths behind each warrior.
On the east and west walls are 16 prints from his Histoire naturelle series (1944)—hybrid creatures blending human, animal, and vegetable forms, each with Labisse’s own descriptive poems. These fantastical beings prefigure his later libidoscaphes (1962), desire-vessels that merge spacecraft with sexual organs and mythological beasts, navigating inner realms of “inadmissible desires masked by propriety.”
Part Jules Verne, part surrealist fever dream, part absurdist comedy, Labisse uses consciousness itself as a vehicle for traveling through forbidden dimensions where eroticism could actually warp reality. The nudity of Labisse’s female subjects is an armor. These women are preparing — for ceremonies, for magic, for battle. Their landscapes exist nowhere and everywhere at once: moon, ocean, future city, ancient temple. Set in mythic space, the women are real–piloting libidoscapes, navigating time, and fighting wars. Labisse enables us to see them through our own myths and knowledge of history. And imagine that perhaps because we see them, they are real. Imagine they are waiting, blue-skinned and patient, for the rest of us to catch up.
Labisse connected to science fiction, painting and drawing what he imagined. But in his work can be found an idea more radical—that artists might actually access non-linear temporal streams, tapping into futures and parallel timelines.
About the Artist
Félix Labisse (1905-1982) was a painter, illustrator, and theater designer who transformed mythology into what he called a “personal demonology.” Born in Northern France, he spent his early years in Douai and later Ostend, Belgium, where he met his mentor James Ensor while studying at the École de Pêche.
His childhood shaped everything: the Gayant carnival with its giant mannequins, living through WWI occupation from ages 9-13, and obsessively reading 19th-century science fiction. By 1933 he’d moved to Paris, where he quickly made a name designing theater sets (for Jean-Louis Barrault and later Jean-Paul Sartre) while painting and befriending other Surrealists—Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux. But Labisse never quite fit André Breton’s official Surrealist movement. He was doing his own thing: Flemish Expressionism meets occult symbolism meets erotic mythology. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1966 and kept working until he died in 1982.
—-Curator Shauta Marsh
Research assistance: Louise Martin
Part one of a four part exhibition series on the artist.

NIGHTJAR: Kenn Hunn
2026-02-18 18:30 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Doors at 6:30 pm, Reading at 7 pm
Featured Poet: Kenn Hunn
Open mic prompt: Write an ode or elegy to something absurd.
Read a poem or short piece that is 317 words maximum, and challenge yourself to share new work!
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About the Featured Poet:
Kenn Hunn recently earned their MFA in poetry at Butler University. They are chronically online (but in a fun way), a habitual Midwesterner exploring identity, pop culture, and their latest hyperfixation.
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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.

Lunar New Year Celebration: Fire Horse
2026-02-21 18:00 - 21:30 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Welcome the Year of the Fire Horse with us and the Indianapolis Chinese Performing Arts (ICPAI) at our annual Lunar New Year celebration!
Enjoy vibrant traditional dance performances by ICPAI and take part in hands-on activities throughout the night, including fireworks, paper cutting, lantern decorating, fan painting, and bracelet making. Food will be available for purchase from the Hachi Machi Asian food truck.
Tickets are $14.64 apiece and can be purchased via Eventbrite.
Schedule of Events:

Activities: 6 – 9:30 p.m.
ICPAI Performances: 7 – 8 p.m.
Fireworks: 9 p.m.

About Lunar New Year:
Lunar New Year is one of the most important celebrations of the year among East and Southeast Asian cultures, including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean communities. Unlike the single-day Gregorian New Year, this holiday is traditionally celebrated over multiple days.
In 2026, Lunar New Year begins on February 17. Known as the Spring Festival (Chūnjié) in China, Seollal in Korea, and Tết in Vietnam, the holiday is tied to the lunar calendar. It originated as a time for feasting and honoring deities and ancestors.
Image: Julie Xiao, Fire Horse (2025)

Sketch Club with India Hines
2026-02-27 15:00 - 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
If you love sketching and are looking for community, hang out and draw with Big Car long-term artist-in-residence, India Hines. Open to all levels and artists of any kind! Beginners are welcome. Just drop by and draw 🙂

www . RachelOrmont . com
2026-03-12 20:00 - 22:30 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
An unflinching psychedelic techno-satire about a woman who unknowingly grows up in captivity working for an advertising agency, starring Betsey Brown (Assholes, The Sweet East), Dasha Nekrasova (Succession, The Beast, Materialists), and Chloe Cherry (Euphoria).

“Boasting a daring lead performance and a wicked sense of humor, this satirical sci-fi comedy delves into themes of performance, digital existence, consumer culture, and contemporary sexuality, offering a provocative and unsettling reflection of our hyper-connected society.” -BLEEDING EDGE

“A filthy and absurd midnight movie determined to fry brains and flip stomachs; a film so terminally online that even the milder scenes would, as the kids say, “kill a Victorian child“.–Pop Matters

Content Warning: This film contains graphic sexual content and nudity.
This screening is 21+ only.

Run Time: 120 min.

Director:Peter Vack
