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Campo de Resonancia (detail), 2026, Ivelisse Jimenez |
A playful installation of hanging painted fields of color by artist Ivelisse Jimenez, is the first exhibition in the major, and most central, gallery space in the newly established Contemporary Art Museum Indianapolis (“CAMi”).
The expansive CAMi building, on an enlarged campus adjacent to the earlier and ongoing Big Car and Tube facilities at the site are in a quiet and conveniently located Garfield Park neighborhood, near the Conservatory, just off Shelby Street on the near southside of Indianapolis.
Jimenez, who has lived and worked in New York previously, and now in Puerto Rico, describes her interests, generally, in the exhibition materials that accompany the show, as an exploration of
“...how experience exceeds language, how what is sensed, felt, or intuited often resists being named.”
The exhibition statement further describes the artist's intentions regarding the name of the piece, her choice of materials and the layout of the installation.
The title of the piece, translated as Resonant Field, is an installation that has been”built from hand-painted transparent and colored vinyl and reclaimed plastics.”
Plastics are chosen for a reason, as described,
“The materials are not neutral. Plastics are 'deeply entangled with human survival, convenience, and innovation, yet inseparable from from environmental degradation.' Jimenez doesn't resolve this contradiction – she works inside it.”
The gallery visitor is invited to enter the “permeable labyrinth” and become a moving vantage point, within the work's tapestry of color.
The sprawling work that fills the large central Jeremy Efroymson Gallery of CAMi, does indeed resist words of explanation. It is more experience than idea.
It is an attraction – a ballroom-sized, 3d maze. And as mazes go, it is much more happy and casual as opposed to cornered or claustrophobic. You can easily imagine a gleeful, family-friendly atmosphere running amok with a good-size, opening-night crowd.
Campo de Resonancia is festive, and a harmony of complimentary hues. There is no free-for-all or clash in the artist's choice and tint of paint – mostly oranges and blue, but some yellow and greens as well.
Pleasing not only in color, there is a serene organization to the right angles and straight lines of the hanging installation. The overall rectangular geometry is amplified by Jimenez painting additional smaller rectangular areas on some of the plastic sheets.
Some of the delicate panels, that sway and move as one walks around them, have the further decoration of large overlaying brushstrokes, and some are mottled with a haphazard and organic distribution of markings that could either be related to a prior patina from an industrial use or perhaps from any of a number of techniques by the artist to vary the surface effects.
Some panels are more transparent and allow an effect of layered color and texture when moving through the work.
Overall, in interacting with the installation, there is no feeling at all that you might be looking at or walking through reclaimed refuse. You might think of shower curtains, just because of the size of the sheets and their colorful plastic, and the fact that they are there hanging in front of your face. But ideas of waste and of landfill do not really come to mind.
There has been a transformation.
The Sprawl of Modernity.
It might be that earlier in the artist's career, her materials' origination as scrap and refuse were more front and center and on display.
Jimenez participated in the 2004 exhibition None of the Above, which was a group show of younger Puerto Rican artists working in non-traditional media.
Held at the Real Art Ways gallery ('RAW') in Hartford Connecticut, the show was covered in the (Connecticut) Record-Journal newspaper on April 25, 2004, in an article by Ralph Hohman.
A photograph of a mixed media piece installed in a gallery corner on two walls by Jimenez, Ten con Ten #2, accompanied the article.
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Ten con Ten #2, Ivelisse Jimenez |
This piece is more obviously an amalgam of found objects and scrap items of plastic than the artist's current installation at CAMi.
Although difficult to know for certain from just a newspaper photo, some of the plastic components seem distressed and stained by an earlier industrial use, and appear taped together and painted, and dotted with rods projecting through the plastic into the wall.
We see the beginning of a sprawling effect of the work moving from an original two-dimensional center out toward the edge and beyond. In this case, onto an adjacent wall, and with the rods, projecting into three-dimensional space.
A few years later, Jimenez would pair with artist Lorri Ott in the two-person show Description Without a Place.
The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported on the artist's methods and motives on March 14, 2008. The article indicated that according to her web site, Jimenez,
“...builds layered constructions on wall surfaces to 'deal with the idea of simultaneity and contradiction.' ”
Elsewhere in the same paper on the same day, writer Dan Tranberg previews Jimenez' exhibition in general terms,
“Over in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, a new two-person show, Ivelisse Jimenez and Lorri Ott: Description Without a Place...will...kick off...today at Exit (a gallery space)...
Both artists explore the idea of applying painterly sensibilities to three-dimensional constructions using a wide variety of found and manufactured materials...
Jimenez taught art at New York University until 2006, when she joined the faculty at the University of Puerto Rico.”
A full review of the show by the same writer would appear in the Plain Dealer two seeks later, on March 28, and include a photo of Jimenez's Ten con Ten 03exit.
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Ten con Ten 03exit, Ivelisse Jimenez |
Tranberg's observations on the historical vein of the work in the show are relevant to Jimenez' current installation in Indianapolis,
“From the mid-1960s on, many artists have explored the elastic boundaries of painting as a unique form by abandoning its most obvious conventions.
Traditional materials such as canvas and rectangular wooden stretchers were among the first to go. More recently, like-minded 'painters' have made use of an array of commercially manufactured materials such as vinyl and acrylic glass in lieu of paint.
In some ways, by stripping away material conventions, these artists are homing in on fundamental conceptual and experimental aspects of painting.”
He continues by discussing Jimenez in particular,
“Jimenez...produces large-scale wall-hung installations that use notions of abstract painting as points of departure.
Variously colored sheets of translucent plastic are cut out to create most of the shapes in her four works in the show. Sheets of frosted plastic veil some areas, blurring and obscuring shapes below.
The optical effects of the configurations...often arranged in loose grid formations, recall a long list of early abstract painters, most notable Hans Hoffman, famous for visually pushing and pulling space with his use of brightly colored rectangles.
Freed as they are from the confines of rectangular canvases, Jimenez's works become actively engaged with the physical space of the gallery (and consequently with viewers)...
In a sense, they are like abstract paintings that have escaped from the two-dimensional realm.”
In 2010, the ideas of abstraction's infiltration into space seem to continue for Jimenez in her solo show at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami. A preview description for the exhibition Blind Enough to See in the March 18, Miami Herald, reads,
“Contrasted with the traditional considerations that the abstract is a negation of space, this body of work by Ivelisse Jimenez reflects upon both the absence and exteriority (the outside) as presences (as opposed to negations).”
Finally, the CAMi exhibition card that accompanies the show depicts the Jimenez wall work, also called Resonant Field, created in 2025.
It seems a continuation of the wall constructions and installations of the artist's 10 con 10 series. Layers of plastic and industrial material such as vinyl tarps and tape, and paint. The work has irregular outward edges, although, by and large, it is made of geometric and rectangular forms. It also has the infiltrating effect of reaching round the corner to start on a new wall.
The artist discusses plastics that wash ashore from the ocean onto the beaches of her current island home of Puerto Rico.
There is something inevitable, something ceaseless and tireless, something restless in the push and pull of tides.
Via her recycling, throwaway raw materials are changed and ultimately transformed.
Jimenez has recycled and transformed a bit of her world, from painting and its two-dimensions to three. From surface to multi-layered and hanging in an ever expanding space. Somehow, she seems to achieve a new level of resonance with each new expanding reach.
From the reclamation of trash from a seashore to an artwork on a gallery wall. From an artwork on a gallery wall to one intruding into the space of a gallery visitor. An now at CAMi, to gallery visitors, strolling amid the happy hallways of her work.
Reaction to Campo de Resonancia is not easily put into words. What one feels or has a sense of is indeed more intuition than explanation.
Of things that wash up on the beach, perhaps driftwood, as opposed to seashells, is an apt metaphor for the work of Jimenez. Broken trees bleached and made more elegant by the relentless action of water and wave.
Mark Diekhoff, August 2026
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