Exhibitions and Programs 

Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Cloud Divination

In this new exhibition, New-York-based multi-media artist Saya Woolfalk explores our understanding of the human condition — a state of affairs governed by seemingly unavoidable conflicts such as birth, growth, and death. This show explores how technology has allowed us to ease our suffering by making change less difficult and transformation more enjoyable. Perhaps the ultimate human technological advancement would be the elimination of mortality by extending human life indefinitely in a biological, digital, or other virtual state. Recent advances suggest our species may already be on the cusp of achieving this evolutionary landmark.

Ballet Austin’s “Cult of Color: Call to Color”

In conjunction with Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Cloud Divination, the Main Gallery video room screened Ballet Austin’s “Cult of Color: Call to Color,” a collaboration by choreographer and Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills, visual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock and composer Graham Reynolds.

The work was selected by Woolfalk and Tube Factory curator, Shauta Marsh as part of a series of artists that have influenced Woolfalk’s work.

Yvette Mayorga: High Maintenance

Yvette Mayorga’s multi-media installation High Maintenance at Tube Factory was a flamboyantly chilling revelation, offering unsettling insights into how the forces of violence, make-believe, and consumerism infiltrate the contemporary immigrant experience, and subvert our understanding of identity.

Drawing inspiration from the politics of America’s southern border with Mexico, her own life as a first generation Latinx-American, and her parents’ often dangerous experiences as immigrants in the 1970s, Mayorga’s work examines how pain and uncertainty are covered with a veneer of celebration.

Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines discuss Ouvrior de Theologies Potentielles at the closing of the Larissa Hammond exhibit. Reines is the author of three poetry collections and the Obie-winning play Telephone. She has created performances and art projects for the Whitney Museum, Works+Process at the Guggenheim, Stuart Shave / Modern Art, & more, and has taught poetry at many institutions, including Columbia, Yale, NYU, & UC Berkeley, where she was the Holloway poet. Recently a Macdowell Fellow, a Dora Maar Fellow, & a poet in residence at the T. S. Eliot House, she performs frequently around the world.

Adrian Matejka -The Big Smoke Reading

The legendary Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxers—and white America—to become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka’s third work of poetry, follows the fighter’s journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka’s book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson’s complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.

Princess: Out There

Tube Factory’s Listen Hear space hosted the Indiana premiere of Out There, a concept video album and live performance by the band Princess that explores the roles men play and those they ought to be playing during the current cultural reckoning with misogyny. The video’s science fiction narrative explores the power of the Divine Feminine through collaborations with musician JD Samson, visual artist Jennifer Meridian, and the band TEEN.

David Schalliol: three communities

We shape our surroundings at the same time our surroundings shape us. Communities and their environments are inseparable. Yet as we go about occupying, utilizing, and altering our natural and built worlds, how much do we think about the connections we share with the others who inhabit the place we call home?

For his exhibition at Tube Factory artspace, David Schalliol addresses the interdependence of people and place through photographs and video interviews with residents of three geographically and culturally unique places.

Casey No & Taylor Rose: Crashing Through the Front Door

Crashing Through the Front Door is a culmination of photography, essays, and oral histories examining queer life in Indianapolis, Indiana through the lens of once-a-month dance party.

Photographer Casey No and writer Taylor Rose met over a decade before the ideation of this project, in southern Indiana. When Low Pone, an Indy-based queer dance party, came to life the subject matter was clear –– the two would chronicle the lives of their queer community as it intersected over one night every month.

Osamu James Nakagawa: Fences // Conner Green: Imperia

Artists Osamu James Nakagawa and Conner Green will present new works that explore outmoded forms of conquest, power, and control—both real and imagined.

Nakagawa’s work will consist of an installation of cyanotype prints created while in Okinawa. Green’s new work extends his exploration of monumentality and power through the language of architectural blueprints.

The two seemingly disparate bodies of work present the question: How do the forces of power and control manifest themselves in real, immediate ways and in our collective conscious?

Jillisblack

Part of the programming with the Carl Pope: Mari Evans exhibition, Tube Factory artspace hosted Jill is Black, a writer, blogger, and facilitator/trainer/lecturer, focusing on issues of Race, Power, and Privilege in modern-day America. She amassed a diverse following via her social media account, @jillisblack–where her social commentary is centered around inner and outer-community hierarchies, the myth of white fragility and other words for racism, the endlessly-pending and highly-exclusive revolution, and dating and relationships through the eyes of social media.

Mike kelley: Day is done

A screening and discussion of Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done. We discussed Kelley’s techniques for creating psychic distortions and the perceived relationship between the person of the artist and the artistic persona and common concepts related to the Carl Pope: Mari Evans exhibition that was on display at Tube Factory artspace. Day Is Done is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing Goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue by artist Mike Kelley. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical spectacle unfolds as a series of episodes that form a loose, fractured narrative.

Mari Evans: carl pope

Mari Evans: Carl Pope revolved around Indianapolis-based writer Mari Evans. One of the founders of the Black Arts Movement and longtime Indianapolis resident, Evans published her first work “Where Is All the Music” in 1968 followed by “I Am a Black Woman” in 1970. During this time, Evans also worked as a producer, writer, and director of “The Black Experience” (1968-1973) — a history documentary that aired on prime time in Indianapolis. Located in the main Tube Factory gallery space, the exhibit was a co-curatorial project between Mari Evans, Carl Pope and Shauta Marsh. It consists of a commissioned installation piece by artist Carl Pope related to Evans’s photos, poetry and book of essays, “Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective.”

Ronaldo V. wilson

As part of the programming with the Carl Pope: Mari Evans, Tube Factory artspace brought Ronaldo V Wilson for a reading and performance. Wilson earned a BA at the University of California-Berkeley, an MA at New York University, and a PhD at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Discussing poetry’s role in the American imagination, especially as a tool to combat powerful, persistent ideas about race, the body, and trauma.

Calvin johnson

Selector Dub Narcotic is the pseudonym of choice for Calvin Johnson when he is re-mixing records for the Dub Narcotic Disco Plate series, or engaged in spinning records at a party or other literary functions. Drawing largely from a stack of 45 rpm phonograph records, Selector Dub Narcotic is known to mix the genres dancehall, soul, punk, garage, R&B, rock steady, bubblegum and rockabilly with assorted curiosities of the current underground music scene.

The hairy man

Since 1721, newspapers in the United States have shared reports of sightings and interactions with beings we call Bigfoot. In Indiana, these sightings have been reported from as close to Indianapolis as the Morgan Monroe State Forest and continue to occur today. The Hairy Man, a historical cryptozoology exhibit was curated by author and Sasquatch expert Christopher Murphy and organized by Tube Factory artspace curator, Shauta Marsh. The Hairy Man, featured artifacts, stories and evidence of Bigfoot’s existence with a focus on the creature as a part of cultural conversations through the centuries. This included an emphasis on the indigenous people of North America. Murphy, who is regarded as one of the top researchers of the history of Bigfoot, originally assembled this collection that contains a 400-pound, 9-foot-tall iron human skeleton, model of a Bigfoot skull, footprint casts, and more. 

Prince rama

Prince Rama is the musical duo of sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson. They have lived in ashrams, worked for utopian architects, written manifestos, delivered lectures from pools of fake blood, conducted group exorcisms disguised as VHS workouts, installed art installations at The Whitney, Art Basel and various galleries across the U.S. This concert was recorded live April 9, 2017, 8 p.m. at our sound art space, Listen Hear.

Carlos RolÓn/Dzine:50 Grand

Before language to Hemingway, from the ancient Sumerians to the Greeks to the modern day, there was the sport of boxing. With the exhibit “50 Grand,” Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón/Dzine presented a dually charged exploration of boxing and domestic culture, inspired by the tactility and performative qualities of boxing, and its relationship to contemporary art at Tube Factory artspace. Within the gallery was an installation of paintings and sculptural fabric works exuberant with color, texture, patterns, and experiments in surface that create a visual dialogue between the physical charge of boxing, the garments worn by the fighters, and the artist’s own childhood home and upbringing as a first-generation immigrant. A series of custom-made trophies titled “Immigrants/Emigrants” (Symbols and Mementos for the Nuyoricans) occupied the den.

larissa hammond: the/ a mind the b mind

“The/a mind the b mind” was a fully commissioned exhibit, featuring four large-scale paintings by Larissa Hammond and one in collaboration with poet Ariana Reines. The exhibit was several years in the making.The paintings themselves are an exploration in communication using a collective unconscious that Hammond built through her writings alongside conversations with Reines.

lashawnda crowe storm/maria hamilton abegunde: keeper of my mothers' dreams

Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams expanded the dialogues began in Crowe Storm’s works Her Name is Laura Nelson and Be/Coming with newly commissioned pieces: Poems, Origin and Sister Song. The writings and libation bowl added new layers to the experiences of remembering words and performances that examine how the abuse, loss, and commodification of one’s womanhood and humanity can be transformed through processes that lead to healing and the re-birthing and re/making of identity. Each piece exhibited in Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams was developed with the hands of many.

Audrey Barcio: Under influence

Heritage is a pressing concern to our generation. Should we allow the past to influence us—are we bound to ancient tools, materials and techniques? Or should we endeavor to make work that is specific to our time, embracing technology and its untested, ambivalent ramifications? If we do, are we at risk of becoming complicit in a catastrophe, or a pale reflection of something fleeting? In her solo exhibition Under Influence at Tube Factory Artspace in Indianapolis, Audrey Barcio explores these questions in a new series of paintings that examines where the heritage of Modernism intersects with the tools of the Virtual Industrial Age. Her starting point for this body of work is the iconic grey and white checkerboard pattern recognized by contemporary digital designers as a symbol for emptiness waiting to be filled. Transforming that virtual nothingness into concrete form, Barcio employs it to empower interpretations of the iconographic legacy of our Modernist forbearers.

Julianna Barwick/mas ySA

2016 Brooklyn experimental artist Julianna Barwick was on tour  with the release of Will, her revelatory third full-length album. Conceived and self-produced over the past year in a variety of locations, the ominous, compelling Will is a departure from 2013’s Alex Somers-produced Nepenthe. If that last record conjured images of gentle, thick fog rolling over desolate mountains, then Will is a late afternoon thunderstorm, a cathartic collision of sharp and soft textures that sounds looming and restorative all at once.