The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Four

Corporeality, Carla Knopp, 1999

Avenue of Lost and Change.

By 1995, the downtown Indianapolis gallery scene was evolving. Places were closing and places were opening on Massachusetts Avenue. Re-locations were occurring away from that Avenue to Vermont Street and Alabama Avenue. Two large art enclaves, also downtown, were gaining steam nearby with the Stutz Building to the west and the Faris Building to the south.

As Carla Knopp continued her decade-long art journey through a changing art world, Steve Mannheimer reflected on the same prior ten years of the downtown Indianapolis art scene up to that point in the mid '90s. His observations were contained in the preamble to his review of two shows opening in April 1995, one of which was at Utrillo Gallery, an upstart space owned and ran by Greg Brown on the city's Near Eastside. 

The column's title was Local art scene is still jumping but not on Mass Ave and appeared in the April 9, 1995, Indianapolis Star. 

In just a few opening paragraphs, he described the state of the city's contemporary art scene of the prior ten years,

“During the last half of the 1980s, the health of the local art scene was gauged by the traffic through the galleries along Massachusetts Avenue. Opening night block parties did not always generate sales, but the masses on Mass. Ave. created the perception that art was...indispensable...

There was even a sort of local 'school' …, particularly the younger painters, who exhibited on Massachusetts.

It never attained nor aspired to the status of an official Indianapolis style – but...(this group) reinforced some mutual tendencies, toward painterly technique, vaguely disquieting content and a distant kinship to the expressionistic tone of the national scene of the day.

Some of the those galleries have disappeared. Others have evolved. Artists who had hoped those bubbly times would elevate their careers have been mostly disappointed.” 

The savvy real estate entrepreneurs and developers had a master plan as early as their first lease on that street to Patrick King in 1983, as covered earlier in this blog.  That plan was coming to fruition. It was a common multi-stage plan of gentrification using art and artists as the fuel, an early catalyst, and, like a rocket ship, when the boost of the first stage was spent, they would be shed away, cast off by stratospheric rent hikes, and abandoned to float or sink.

Essential, Folk, Outsider and Found.

So amid the change of this period, Greg Brown's Utrillo Gallery opened in 1995.  It would be an important venue for the work of Carla Knopp.

The location at 2630 East 10th Street was in an untapped art area of the Near Eastside.  

According to a March 16, 1997, Indianapolis Star feature article about him and his gallery by S. L. Berry,  Brown described the plentiful storefronts and cheap rents, and saw not only a prime location for his gallery, but for a future alternative scene to add to Mass Ave area and the loft buildings. 

An early and essential show at Utrillo was covered by Steve Mannheimer in the April 9, 1995, Indianapolis Star mentioned above.  

That show, World in Balance was an exhibition that,

“...features a dozen or so mobiles and collages by Indianapolis artist Gwendolyn Skaggs...

Gravity provides the only glue. Everything is suspended by a thread or loose wire and hangs together only by the grace of a still room...

Skaggs likes the precariousness of it all."

Mannheimer then quotes the artist and concludes his thoughts, 

" 'For each of these objects there is only one direction and one position in which it can hang. It fits my concept of living.'

...Skaggs has created a complete aesthetic: Her method is her metaphor – and vice versa.”

Brown would operate at that location for a couple of years, and then would move locations by 1998 to a building at 3318 East 10th Street. 

2630 East 10th Street as it appears today,
location of first Utrillo Gallery

Utrillo's would present what may be the most eclectic range of art and artists in the city during those times, with shows that included the intriguingly titled Sgt. Joe Griffith's Paintings of: The Kennedy Assassination in February 1998, a show of his own paintings called Cardboard and Canvas a few months later, as well as found art, folk art and thrift store art over the following months and years. 

Artists, in addition to Carla Knopp, included the quasi-outsider, Harry Blomme, and the iconoclastic self-proclaimed Allist, Jan Scott Boyer.  

In a 1998 exhibition, Utrillo Gallery presented Passionate Visions: Contemporary Folk Art of the South, selections from the personal collection of Robert Dawson, an IUPUI media studies teacher. 

S.L. Berry of the Indianapolis Star would preview the show in a Visual Arts column on July 21 of that year.

The writer described paintings as the primary focus of Dawson's collection, quoting the collector as follows,

“I especially like memory paintings...things that people paint later in their lives when they're recalling events or experiences or places in their past.”  

Berry also quotes Greg Brown about the show,

“The fine art community and the folk art community are starting to understand one another. This show is a conduit for furthering that.”

In March of 1999, Utrillo Gallery would exhibit the found-object creations of homeless outsider, William Talley. Later that same year in August, Greg Brown would exhibit his own collection of thrift shop prints and copies by French street scene painter, Maurice Utrillo, the inspirational namesake of his gallery.     

Carla Knopp would exhibit at Utrillo Gallery on several occasions, with painting shows including Villages in 1996, May Flowers in 1997 and  American Legion Show in 1999. 

She would also co-produce the gallery's public-access TV show with Brown, a further conduit of of connection between the street, outsider and folk art scenes and fine arts in the city.

Mapping the Ineffable in Multi-Dimensions.

Spelunker, Carla Knopp, 1999

It is perhaps fitting that Carla Knopp would show at Utrillo during the gallery's run in the mid-to-late 1990s.  

Folk art collector Robert Dawson's description of 'memory painting' might well apply to the surreal landscapes produced by Knopp during this time. But Knopp's paintings, although perhaps personal in part, seemed tapped into a broad and ancient memory bank –  or maybe timeless is the better word. A boundless collective store of information –  pre-conscious, post-conscious, unconscious, – consisting of an archetypal alien vocabulary of dreamy mysterious hieroglyphs. 

During this period, she captures views of un-graspable vistas, not nightmares or unnerving, but strange, pleasant harmonies of color and characters captured from yelping spurs of thought, memory or imagination.

Corporeality, 1999, paints a picture (top of page), labeled with that word, of  an all-seeing vine that tangles a grid between a bizarre rounded rise of snow, and a warm-colored sky. A prone snowman of sorts is rolling down a slope toward the viewer. Eerie eyeballs of gray, yellow and orange form a stack of spheres in the 'sky' echoed by the three spheres of the puffy 'snowman' below. It is an inexplicable scene, but of such pleasing colors and soft, rounded forms – two worlds, one painted cold and one colored warm –  divided by the bristling vines that guard the wonder of the winter scene from the sunset eyes in the sky.

Spelunker, 1999,  (above) alludes to cave exploration, and is an image that could be equally at home on a Robert Heinlein paperback or a shoegaze CD; the muted range of color and the hazy atmosphere, the segmented mechanics of the insectoid reptile to the left and the graceful and organic symmetry of the blinded weedflower to the right. 

There is a slight orientation of the interior landscape by a central columnar rocky form, but the scene seems to shift in the distance from a peaceful pastoral in shades of purple to a skull-like menace with an orange orb of an eye, and even into a presiding figure with outstretched arms, if you stare long enough. 

Both Corporeality and Spelunker contain the interplay of otherworldly biomorphic vegetation with serene circular forms seen in Knopp's earlier painting, Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes. 

In two additional pictures from the period, we see the glimmering golden green of Arcadian landscapes, populated not by people, but by peculiarities. 

Tippi's Water Garden, Carla Knopp, 1999

Tippi's Water Garden, 1999, presents of a small dog, knee-deep in water, at the edge of a pond. A tennis ball floats nearby but the pooch seems to be looking past it. In the waters beyond, perhaps the dog is seeing things. Various animal forms – a bird, a bug, a teddy bear. Teeming things among the moss-covered rocks.

Another greenish gold picture, marvelously funny and charming, is Victorian Gray, 1999. The painting shows a steam-punk flying saucer, decorated with fussy brocade, hovering lopsided above a hilly pasture, seen between two trees. 

The 'gray' is a classic alien of the 'man from Mars' type. The being is enclosed in a soap bubble sphere atop the fancy-dress spacecraft –  or great grandma's lampshade –  whatever the case may be.   

Carla Knopp will exhibit less frequently in Indianapolis over the following few years. However, by about 2007, she will appear again with exhibits at several different venues with her ever evolving  artworks in the ever evolving art scene, as we shall see in Part 5.

Victorian Gray, Carla Knopp, 1999

Mark Diekhoff, May 2026

See also:

Greg Brown - Utrillo Gallery photos at flickr

Harry Blomme exhibition at Utrillo Gallery article by Mary Lee Pappas, NUVO.net

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