The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Three

Morning On Earth, Carla Knopp

In Vivo Cross-Fertilization.

Part Two ended with Carla Knopp's show of oil painting portraits in June 1991 at Artigliography, a gallery located at 415 Massachusetts Avenue, in a group show called Oils, Prints and Holography. That date was just a month after the planned, but canceled, exhibit of the her same works at the Hindman Gallery, which closed suddenly at the end of April.

By summer's end, Bill Adkin's formerly of 431 Gallery and most recently, Hindman's, would hang a shingle again on Mass Ave, again at the address 431, but upstairs. Steve Mannheimer, in his weekly arts column, Visual Arts, in The Indianapolis Star, would re-introduce Adkins and the launch of his latest venture in an article on September 1, 1991,

“Named the In Vivo Galley, it is the latest – maybe the last for a long time – project of art maven and once-and-future gallery director Bill Adkins.

   Last March, Adkins announced that he had persuaded his employer, Marge Hindman, to expand her Geist Reservoir gallery to include a branch showroom above the 431 Gallery along the city's Downtown art spine.

   A month later, and barely 24 hours before Hindman, Adkins and the landlord were to ink the contract, Hindman's lawyer departed the world – and took the deal with him.

   Hindman found a new lawyer. He didn't think much of Adkin's idea. The deal fell from limbo into perdition.

   While she was at it, Hindman decided to close that half of her gallery devoted to contemporary art – the half where Adkins worked.”

As it would turn out, Adkins, with wife Julie, decided to seek financing and open In Vivo themselves. As Mannheimer further described,

“(In September 1991...) In Vivo Gallery will open its first show. The exhibiting artists will be members of the Indianapolis Artists Forum, which despite its officious title, is an informal association of youngish Indianapolis painters.

   They are Rex Alexander, Terry Copen, Katherine Ellis Copen, Brian Fick, Anita Giddings, Jonathan Grober, Holly Jackson, Carla Knopp, Steve Paddack and Ed Sanders.”

Mannheimer quotes Bill Adkin's aspirations for the gallery, as reflected in its name, In Vivo, a Latin phrase meaning 'in life,'

“It is a living active thing that you can see evolve before your own eyes. It represents what is happening right here in our own city. (The gallery offers) the dealer and the patron a chance to actually become a significant part of that creative process. The patron plays as much a role in the evolution of art as the artists. 

   Instead of contributing to art history by purchasing something that is already established somewhere else, you're actually helping to mold the future aesthetic direction of your own environment.” 

A few months later, Steve Mannheimer will review an exhibit of Brian Fick and Rex Alexander at In 

Vivo in his April 5, 1992, column in The Star, headlined Goofy Yet Gloomy.  The writer describes not only the works of those two artists, but In Vivo's roster in general, as he tries to put his finger on the unifying theory connecting all the Indianapolis Downtown Mass Ave artists, particular those at In Vivo. 

First, about Fick, Mannheimer writes,

“(Brian Fick's Bicycle...is one of (his) better recent pieces, another scene from an ongoing semi-symbolic, semi-narrative reconstitution of the artist's life. 

   And it is yet another scene from the goofy, gloomy theater of paintings that Fick and his friends have produced during the past few years in a collective illustration of their lives in this city and their take on it...

   (Bicycle and other current works) are more generic and thus more allegorical, more open to speculation.

   What is certain, though, is a peculiar bittersweet flavor of comedy and melancholy.”   

 

Bicycle, Brian Fick, c. 1992

And in a give and take Mannheimer had with Adkin's as they strolled the gallery, about the style of not only Fick, but Steve Paddack and others artists on the roster, he quotes Adkins, 

“ 'It's a common vein that flows through a lot of the work we show,' says gallery owner Bill Adkins. He gestures at a large painting by one of Fick's contemporaries, Steve Paddack. It depicts two empty, rather dilapidated rooms, 'dead ends,' Adkins calls them.

   Adkins admits, 'Many potential patrons...think the works are too gloomy or too intense. It's true that we think less in terms of decoration and more in terms of commentary on the artist's environment. Our artists let a certain psycho-social concern come through.' ”

Mannheimer sums up his observations by again going all-in collective, as he explains the connections among Rex Alexander's work and that of the other gallery artists,

“Despite the elegance (of Rex Alexander's 'tasteful' and 'meditative' 'almost abstractions'), the elegy is the same song sung in the bop and glop of Fick and Paddack –  and to varying degrees in the work of other gallery artists Ed Sanders, Jean Salzman, Terry Copen, Carla Knopp, Thomas Fellner, Gretchen Hancher and Anita Giddings.

   All are united in the underlying premise that their collective scene is uneasy with the grand visions imposed by billboard optimism. These artists have slid into a slough of cultural claustrophobia cluttered with unknowable signs and portents.

   Standing hip-deep in this cold stew, they react with an expression equally sneer and giggle and a certain playful willingness to paint with the muck.”

A month later, In Vivo would present Paintings by Holly Jackson and Carla Knopp.  Unfortunately, the show was not reviewed by the daily papers, and the catalog of Knopp's work in the show is difficult to know. 

House of Zod, Carla Knopp

A painting from the time that may serve as hint is House of Zod.  It is an unusual picture, painterly, of minimal content yet possessing a shimmering beauty and spaciousness. 

The interior of some unknown building – some old wooden workshop, or stable or bar –  is filled with a  couple of unrecognizable objects; a spiky bio-morph at the left edge of the painting and a small vertical white object atop a tall table or counter to the right. The scene contains just one semi-clear image, that of a disembodied steering wheel. Rudimentary in appearance, like off of an antique tractor, the tri-spoked wheel sits on the floor of an interior of shimmering gold. An infusion of promise and loss are more felt than seen in the broken luster of the room.  

It is a painting with the In Vivo-style espoused by Adkins, and ascertained by Mannheimer, well within the realm of damaged beauty on dead end avenue.  An artwork seriously at play –  giddy in the golden goop.

Seminal Shows and Pivotal Paintings.

Carla Knopp's association with In Vivo Gallery would result in an extraordinarily busy and prolific period in her early career. The year 1993, in particular, she participated in two shows just in the last half of that year. But she and her artworks were well represented for the entire period that In Vivo operated from 1991 through 1996.

A group show of seventeen In Vivo Gallery artists was held in September, 1993, the opening show of that fall's season,  and included Knopp. The show was reviewed by Steve Mannheimer in his Indianapolis Star column at the time. Ruschman Gallery, on Mass Ave as well, was also showing its group of artists at the time, and Mannheimer used his column to express the distinctions between the group shows. To get the gist of his reaction and subsequent thesis, the article is quoted at length,

“Gallery group shows are curious affairs. Generally, they mean nothing more than 'Here are the artists this gallery represents.' Rarely, if ever, do such broad spectrum selections demonstrate anything other than the gallery owner's taste – or at least the sense of which artists may have sold in the past.

   In Ruschman's case, this makes for a smorgasbord. Fine individual pieces by individual artists have little to say to each other. Certainly, there are some similarities of imagery among the artists, but it's almost a matter of coincidence...

   On occasion, however, a group show may reveal something deeper. Then, the gallery selection seems to reinforce some set of sensibilities widely held among the artists shown.

   All of the work seems a mood, in the same aesthetic ballpark and, thus, from the same psychic corner of day. That's the case with In Vivo.”  

 

Mannheimer explains further,

“Most of  the 43 works at In Vivo share a certain rough-and-ready approach to materials with more emphasis on textural exuberance than technical finesse.  

   The air of informality bespeaks of a modesty of means more than any lack of artistic ambition. Carla Knopp's Wagon Train and Ed Sander's Dwarf Pope are oil sketches aimed at some of painting's most venerable traditions.

   What unites all of this work is a generally wry or ironic attitude that just as readily expresses 

itself in buoyant splashes of color...”  

  

Just a month later, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by critic's demand (or nudging), In Vivo would present a two-person show of Carla Knopp and Ed Sanders, in an exhibit described as 'mingled' new paintings. 

The show was previewed by Nan Hoffman in The Indianapolis News on November 11, 1993.  Knopp's contributions included small oil paintings, described as “painterly and humorous” in the article, whereas Sander's painters were described as “larger, more brutal works in oil.” 

Knopp's work Morning on Earth (top of page) was included in the show. The painting shows a development in which the artist depopulates her paintings. Recall her works from the mid-1980s were often figural quips or peopled, allegorical tableaux. But Morning on Earth presents an almost empty environment of  rolling landscape, colored by orange grass and red and pink hills. Its vivid, saturated hues, almost garish, attract the eye like a Dr. Seuss book to its page. Atop a crest of the rolling orange meadow, that is punctuated all over with a razor stubble of protruding sticks, sits an old fashioned wind-up alarm clock, tiny in the scheme of things, but jumping out from the canvas, with time reading 7:17. 

The picture's theme and a title that will recur, as we shall see, in many artworks by Knopp in the days, even decades, to come.   

Again, just a month or so later, Steve Mannheimer will visit In Vivo and present his findings in an article in The Star dated December 19. In it he covered the two-person show of Carla Knopp and Ed Sanders. It would be the most thoughtful and deep look at Knopp's work in Indianapolis to that date. The theme of the column's opening paragraphs is a 'twins separated by birth' tale,

“Ed Sanders and Carla Knopp...have been friends for years. They graduated from the same art school, drank at the same bars, attended the same parties and probably have had more than a few conversations about what matters on canvas.

   But that was the extent of (it)...

   It certainly doesn't explain why their work should appear to be cut so much from the same artistic cloth...  

   ...it was a sustained surprise to the artists when they came to install the exhibition...the two spent a good part of the day oohing and ahhing about the parallels,  and decided to take full advantage of them.

   Thus, we see such side-by-side pairings as Knopp's Birththrust with Sanders' The Plant, or face-to-face comparisons between Sanders' Last Day in Eden and Knopp's Recluse.

   At points, the similarities are startling, enough to give the viewer a few moments of pause attempting to guess who did which without reading the labels.” 

Well-Blessed Swim, Carla Knopp

Portrait of Innocent X, Ed Sanders

Mannheimer goes on the describe the techniques employed by the artists, and the resulting images,

“Both painters apply their paint in a loose, wet-on-wet technique that tends to evolve – or devolve... – into a tight range of colors hesitating between muddy sidewalks and rainbow sherbet on a foggy day.

   The visual effect is not unappealing; it is just more true than beautiful. Theirs is an urban and pedestrian vision rather than an academic one...

...Their images may be found in an emotional range as muddled as their colors, equally free of either brilliant highlights or dark stark shadows.

   Any heroics are tempered by discord; moments of poetry are short and idiosyncratic – as may be witnessed but not deciphered in works like Knopp's charmingly cryptic Gifted and Lucky or Sanders' Drapery.

   Similarly, their humor is oblique and laughter somewhat strangled – as in her quirky Morning on Earth or his Buck-Toothed Idol.” 

Gifted and Lucky, Carla Knopp

Mannheimer finally abandons his first impressions regarding lost twins and the like, and settles on a more carefully crafted, and novel, hypothesis, 

“If anything, (Knopp and Sanders) demonstrate the artistic equivalent of evolutionary convergence, where two separate species exhibit surprisingly similar appearances  perhaps due to adaptive responses to similar circumstances...

   It does seem a safe bet...that these two have their mutual fingers on some detectable but spiritually syncopated pulse of our times and our town.”    

 

Viva In Vivo!

By 1995, In Vivo Gallery had relocated from Mass Ave to 326 East Vermont. Steve Mannheimer discussed In Vivo's move, and the trial and tribulations of trying to sell its artists' works to corporate types, with gallery owner Bill Adkins in a column printed in the March 26 Star. 

   (The column also covered a solo exhibition at Ruschman Gallery and a three-person show at Chatham Gallery, a newer space on Mass Ave.)  

   The show at In Vivo was a group show, including long-standing artists Ed Sanders, Steve Paddack, Brian Fick, Carla Knopp, Holly Jackson, Doug Travis, Anita Giddings, Rex Alexander, Terry Copen, Becky Wilson, Madison Webb, Mark Jennings and Jesse Speight. Newer artists included Stephanie Newman, Jean Salzmann, Sandy Hauanio, Ralph Domenico, Besty Stirratt, and Craig McDaniel.

   Mannheimer described the overall vibe of In Vivo's multitude of offerings,

“More often than not, the work is technically grittier, more vaguely expressionistic, generally more mysterious and disquieted than...Corporate art.”

Mannheimer quotes Adkin's about the conundrum,

“A group of corporate clients came to our gallery once to look a show and they just walked around muttering to themselves...'Not hangable.' 

   ...In Vivo is a gallery for people who want to consider art more than decoration. I won't apologize for the fact that this art makes you think. If people want Muzak art, they should go to the mall.”

 

Carla Knopp's last show solo show at In Vivo would be at the Vermont Street location in June, 1995. The show was called Digging for Fire after a lyric from the similarly titled Pixies song from 1990. 

The song was by a band that was to be hugely influential on the later group Nirvana, and thus the entire grunge-era '90s. 

Its lyrics tell a simple story, in two verses, of an old woman, and then an old man. One kneeling in a hole, one sleepless on a bench. Each on a tireless quest –  not searching for some buried treasure or expecting some jackpot at the end of the rainbow,  but digging for fire. That was each their desire, right where they were. The omniscient voice of the singer, whether Black Francis or some anonymous troubadour he imagined into existence, acknowledges that the man, in verse two, lives in a town where the singer, himself, will someday live.  

A painting of flaming gold and alien foliage from the show Digging for Fire by Carla Knopp is Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes. It is technically gritty, vaguely expressionistic and more mysterious and disquieted than corporate art. But there is something more to its song.

All these years later, it bellows like a plea screamed from beneath an opiated bridge or from inside a  gardener's backyard loft. A plea for something better, something good, something beautiful. A guttural plea – she answered with a painting –  that has outlasted Muzak, and even the mall. 

Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes, Carla Knopp

Mark Diekhoff, April 2026

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