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The Church (detail) from Kept Secrets: Open Code by Cory Robinson at Tube Gallery, CAMi |
The Doors Open at CAMi
The Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) has opened this summer with a broad range of art exhibits in its new building and the adjoining campus facilities.
The debut of the newly expanded and extensively renovated Big Car Collaborative campus in its Garfield Park neighborhood, just blocks south of Fountain Square, was previewed in the Indianapolis Business Journal, the (Franklin) Daily Journal, and The Indianapolis Star earlier this year.
The entire 5-acre campus, that includes the recently opened 40,000 square-foot CAMi Main building, the adjacent Tube Factory art space (Tube) and Guichelaar Gallery, is tucked on Cruft Street east of Shelby and north of the south boundary of Bean Creek.
The beautifully designed and landscaped exterior spaces include features and attractions like the Chicken Chapel of Love, Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary and Bean Creek Overlook. Also on that block of Cruft, north of Bean Creek and the art buildings, are 18 affordable-living homes for artists.
Areas to stroll, relax and explore confront the visitor at every turn on the campus, inside and out.
CAMi Main is home to a range of galleries, activity spaces, artist studios and storefront shops. Unique features of the building's configuration and spaces, some of which has been retained from its original industrial layout, include the large Basile Hall performing arts room, the corner nook for the Big Car Colaborative's WGRT radio station and the O.P.T.I.O.N.A.L space, the quirky cube of an island office of the former building supervisors that has been repurposed as what exactly? It is an individual surprise for the CAMi visitor to discover.
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Sold Ya, Samuel Levi Jones in the Katharine B Sutphin Gallery in CAMi Main |
Many separate gallery rooms, from intimate to large, are contained within CAMI Main and Tube. So numerous one is likely to miss something on a single visit.
The ambitious, and one assumes, tireless and arduous efforts of Big Car founding collaborators, Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh, along with innumerable fellow travelers, sponsors and donors have resulting in a stunning, diverse and almost hyper multi-purpose venue for the offering and appreciation of arts in the city.
In experiencing the first iterations of exhibitions, CAMi's unique, cutting-edge was on full display.
A Sample of the Shows.
As mentioned, there is almost too much to see and do at CAMi to take it all in at once. But you can try.
In CAMi Main's central Jeremy Efroymson Gallery, as covered in an earlier blog here, is the interactive Ivelisse Jimenez installation, Campo de Resonancia.
Nearby is Kept Secrets: Open Code, an exhibition in three parts by Cory Robinson that can be seen in Tube Gallery, located in an adjacent building with Normal Cafe.
With Kept Secrets, the visitor first encounters The Garden, a series of carved redwood sculptures and light elements in organic shapes that suggest plants and leaves. The interplay of positive and negative space and play of light and shadow create a depth to the frieze-like presentation of the plants against a green wall.
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| The Garden from Kept Secrets: Open Code by Cory Robinson |
Across from this sculpture garden, and on either side of the main gallery entrance in The Court sit a pair of throne-like chairs. With their unusual circular design overall, the beginning glyphs of the artist's CODEX vocabulary are revealed. In the tile work component of the chairs, circles and curving lines repeat asymmetrically, although in a graceful and flowing way. One throne has predominately pink tile offset with brown, and the other predominately brown offset with pink – together, providing a sort of yin yang balance between the two.
Walking past the thrones and into The Church, in the ambiance and quiet of a darkened room, the visitor will encounter a mixed-media installation comprised of five large, free-hanging, panels of textile artwork. The exhibit manifest that accompanies the display provides some rudimentary explanation for an artwork difficult to explain,
“The Church features five large, tufted rugs installed in a continuous curved sequence, evoking the apse of a cathedral...the designs translate the flat graphic language of the CODEX Series into textile compositions – digitally precise in conception yet softened and humanized in their yarn-rendered finish.”
Within each large and roughly square ivory-colored rug, a sculptural formation of the artist's CODEX components are distributed each to its own (image top of page). They appear as metallic widgets, even when composed of shag rug. The nameless deities are copper colored and presumably shiny, circular and disc shaped variously like cymbals, hockey pucks, stacked flat plates or vessels.
In the future we will all be famous for fifteen minutes, as Andy Warhol predicted way before the age of social media. Robinson's CODEX deities seem to allude to as many different religions as there are individual people, as there are combinations of widgets. As many as the combinations of numbers in data centers, in our not too distant future. Metallic godheads, warm and fuzzy, for the depopulated factories of AI.
Back in CAMi Main, perhaps the most traditional of the contemporary art exhibited in the inaugural shows is From the Collection Of... in the Katharine B Sutphin Gallery.
Mostly two-dimensional art hanging from the walls make up the eleven works borrowed from the collections of various CAMi donors.
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Bestiary, Katharine B. Sutphin |
Two oil on canvas paintings by gallery namesake Katharine B. Sutphin are included, both neo-expressionist in style; Bestiary and Subway Solitude. A modern chaos seems more to be enjoyed than feared in her paintings which possess vibrant color and spontaneous energy.
Sold Ya by Samuel Levi Jones is described as a color flatbite and aquatint on paper (image above). An austere and minimal effect is achieved by the artist with greens and tans and the rectangular formations of regimental and recurring shapes that make up the work.
Additional works in a variety of media including an Untitled hanging fabric, black and thinly vertical by Jesse Robinson. This piece goes well with the monochrome or minimally colored works in the room; Bigfoot, a cyanotype by Casey Roberts, Venice Notebook, 2001 #8 a lithograph by Richard Serra and Looking for Elsewhere VII, graphite and spray paint on paper by Barb Bondy.
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After Party, Grace by Eunshin Kim |
After Party, an oil on canvas painting by Grace Eunshin Kim, Ancestral Spirit Dance #281 by Willis 'Bing' Davis and To See Her Smile a mixed media assemblage by Samuel E. Vazquez round out the artists represented in the show.
Sights and Songs and Place.
Sounds accompany the sights of many of the inaugural exhibits at CAMi, including the video art pieces You're Standing Inside the Instrument: A Score for 19 Buildings, Untitled (m.j. The symptom), and Drafts.
You're Standing Inside the Instrument is a collaborative piece that paired twenty architects and designers with an equal number of artists. According the exhibit manifest that accompanied the work, the architects each chose a favorite Indianapolis building and from there, the artist would take over, and play some “aspect or aspects of the building as sort of instruments to create a part of a combined soundscape or sort of a song.”
In CAMi Main's Listen Hear Gallery, a dark room ideal for the presentation of audio-video work, the visitor is surrounded by stationary, restful video images of the chosen buildings, each on a video flatscreen.
The buildings are mostly familiar icons of the Indianapolis architectural landscape, although a handful are more seldom seen.
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still image from You're Standing Inside the Instrument by a collaboration of architects and artists |
Standing in the dark space of glowing screens, one is also in a surround of soft noises. A lush mix of minimal, industrial and urban sounds. It is not really unease or anxiety that the broadcast layer of music creates. Maybe a slight Kafka-esque confusion when trying to unravel a bureaucratic babble and make sense of what is being heard.
Percussive sounds and whistles. Footsteps tap with hammering beats amid a muffled flow of traffic. A vestige of a human parade echoing atop the distant screech of trolley wheels. Plane sound and birds chirping, soft and deep, within the hum.
It is not a happy sound of ribbon-cutting fanfare, rather the ghosts and spirits of the buildings stirring restlessly within stone and steel. And no words.
There is a sweet spot at the back of the gallery where seemingly all is heard, both close to the ear and buried in the distance – a comforting white noise of societal static – at least for city dwellers.
In that spot it all comes together, each individual note is subsumed into the larger score. It's bricks and mortar breathing.
In Drafts by Jess Dunn and Sylvia Thomas, another collaboration, but of just two.
The video piece is a looping cycle through time, a barrage of nostalgia and vintage charm with ever changing images and sounds. A one-way primordial travelogue from eden to pioneer, to civilized, to mechanized, to industrialized, to post whatever we call the present now.
Dunn and Thomas acted as joint researchers, film editors, animators and music composers in the complex assembly of the chronological and captivating video work. The multi-screen projection shows a time compressed history of the vicinity and location of CAMi today.
A viewer can enter at any moment in the timeline, and if patient, await the work's eventual fulfillment and repeat.
I was reminded of the iconic short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. But whereas that film was a picnic blanket romp through macro and then micro space, Drafts is a time-bending stationary hitchhike atop a singular plot of dirt just north of a creek where the viewer is actually standing at that moment.
No spoiler descriptions of the many cascading images and sounds contained in the video will be commented on here. The video work is best experienced by the viewer within the room.
Both Drafts and You're Standing Inside the Instrument, despite their many and mesmerizing multi-facets, are really quite simple. They invite you into the experience, the history and the song, of the place where you actually are.
Mark Diekhoff, August 2026
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