Historicity artist reception

In partnership with the Department of Metropolitan Development of the City of Indianapolis, the Harrison Center presents “Historicity” with an artist reception on October 5 from 6:00 to 9:00pm. Enjoy an evening of art, cast your vote for your favorite team in the Thriving Neighborhood Challenge, learn more about IndyGo’s plans for rapid transit in Indianapolis, and let your voice be heard on four major City plans: Plan 2020’s Marion County Land Use Plan, Thrive Indianapolis, the White River Vision Plan, and Indy Moves. In the Harrison Center gym, the Exhibition on City Planning will be an open-house where the public can learn more about the processes that guide the development of Indianapolis, as well as an invitation to get more involved in building the city of tomorrow. Participants will enjoy the event as a First Friday art exhibition, while also having the opportunity to provide feedback on the future of land use, resiliency, the White River, and transportation in the city. The four finalists for the Thriving Neighborhood Challenge will present their ideas and the audience will have the opportunity to vote on the winner to receive a $2,500 micro grant.

The Harrison Gallery features new work by artist and historian, Kipp Normand. “For Historicity, the task I have set myself is to ask some essential questions. What do we believe about ourselves? About our history? About our future as a city? This is an opportunity to tell the stories of Indianapolis. The familiar stories and those that ought to be familiar.” Normand is a student of material culture with a Master’s in American Studies from the University of Notre Dame. He spent nearly 30 years working in the field of heritage preservation and housing reform before turning to the practice of art. He maintains a studio and workspace at the Harrison Center where he creates dynamic works of visual art infused with stories of local history, culture and community.

The City Gallery presents “Head in the Clouds” by Alicia Zanoni. This collection of urban landscapes explores the way dreams often feel through the use of atmospheric imagery. As a painter, Zanoni is drawn to color and light, always trying to find surprising elements in familiar scenes and, conversely, familiar elements in abstract scenes.

In the Speck Gallery, 2015 Harrison Center fellow Caleb Stoltzfus returns with “Process to Impact.” This exhibit includes paintings and studies that feature characters places, atmospheres, and traditions that the artist witnessed while traveling through Spain and Morocco. Since his “Prophets” show at the Harrison Center in 2015, Stoltzfus spent two years traveling and studying plein air painting and composition. Developing these skills have helped the artist give his paintings a feeling of realness and impact: the reality that our surroundings are just as real as we are, and that the foreign is as real as the familiar.

In the Gallery Annex, The Language of Houses Overheard from the Sidewalk by Will Carpenter. On vertically oriented canvasses, brushed oil paint represents the exterior of houses that stack on top of each other in impossible towers. In some paintings emotive content streams from cold achromatic schemes, others burst into vibrantly pulsing hues. These otherworldly columns of houses create imaginatively rising neighborhoods out of reconfigured roofs, gables, gutters, windows, awnings, doors, and their shadows. Other aspects of the suburban architectural environment including trees, yard ornaments, cars, and mowed lawns anchor these ethereal scenes in specifics. The paintings merge aspects of Japanese landscape paintings with the shape-play of cubism, and the lighting of painters like Edward Hopper. This leaves the viewer with a flickering, head-spinning, not-always-fully-there feeling combined with a sober quietness. The paintings play visual games that seem to rhyme various shapes, colors, lines and lighting aspects so that each painting prevails as a visual poem.

The work hangs through October 26.

With support from: the Department of Metropolitan Development, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the Indiana Arts Commission, Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, Allen Whitehill Clowes Foundation, the Indianapolis Foundation, Sun King Brewery, and Matinee Creative.