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.

With this exhibit, Harkins looks at land in two different ways: a path toward healing due to the desecration of burial mounds in New Harmony, Indiana and how the Land Back movement addresses climate change. Harkins, a multi-disciplinary artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Tube Factory curator Shauta Marsh, researched and worked on this exhibit for five years as part of Big Car Collaborative’s decade-long research project, Social Alchemy, that explores utopia and dystopia with an emphasis on the southern Indiana town of New Harmony that was twice the site of utopian experiments.  

Ocean resembles a soap opera, but with the eerily calm, disembodied voice-over of a guided meditation: “If you don’t want to drown, be an ocean.” The video begins by instructing the viewer to adjust her posture in relation to the screen and finishes by likening the viewer’s smile at her reflection to “the embarrassment of a blind date”—a playful take on Brechtian Verfremdung.

Most of us live in a world of constant noise and overstimulation, fragmenting our own perception and memory. Information (and misinformation) overload has forever changed the human experience thanks to constant access to the Internet. Instead of living in the moment, we are constantly challenged by the temptation of filling the void with seconds-long dopamine boosts reinforced by our personal algorithms in our artificial digital worlds.

To walk through the installation, Mem, is to enter a myth. A kaleidoscope of the divine feminine, there are fountains of light centering the space on the painting of Miriam– one of the seven major prophetesses of Israel. Miriam carried a rock from which flowed an abundant amount of water during the 40 years Jewish people searched for a place to live in the desert. Access to this water made survival of her people possible.

The abstract textiles and works on paper by Julian Jamaal Jones for his exhibit Take Me Back glean fragments from the songs, poetry, sounds, and his feelings for the Black church experience of the 1990s. The exhibit opens Jan. 5 and runs through March 24 at Tube Factory artspace. Chief curator, Shauta Marsh, was instantly drawn to the works, seeing an element of emotive storytelling in the abstract pieces — something that is quite unique.

Meggan Gould’s Sorry, No Pictures examines photographic tools and technologies and their constant teeter on the edge of obsolescence. Gould takes apart and re-contextualizes the smallest aspects of the medium, including the iconography of camera dials, the design of viewfinder patterns, and the ubiquitous Epson inkjet printer test pattern. Intertwined with personal narrative, the artist uses “playful resistance” in her work to question the role of corporations and manufacturers of photographic technologies — from Kodak to Flickr — in shaping photography, image-making, vision, and the language surrounding the medium.

As the United States continues to face its history of enslavement, oppression, and exclusion of Black Americans in museums and other arenas of power and recognition, “Process as Practice: Reimagining the Lost Hardrick Mural” is impactful and unique. The exhibit is part of an ongoing partnership between artist Kaila Austin; the Norwood community on the southeast side of Indianapolis, and the family of Indiana’s Harlem Renaissance painter, John Wesley Hardrick (1891-1968).

“In 2015 — after over a decade of painting and art making — I asked myself what brought me to want to create in the first place. Thinking back to my childhood, it was probably directly linked to enjoying playing with plastic blocks and how excited I was to get my hands on a grid-lined sketchbook. I would design my own toys and sketch out the floor plans for houses, cars and symmetrical objects.

The narrative of femininity is pain.

Cicatrix: the scar of a healed wound. In botany, cicatrix refers to the keloid mark left on a tree after a piece of it has been removed. In this body of work, I am exploring the personal maternal scar of being taken away from the only real parental figure I had until that point in life, the complex scars of colonialism and immigration, and the physical scars of my own body.