Meares will also host a special guest appearance of musician and artist Peter Adriel Kennell.

Mike Meares loves to work in layers of line and color to create bold engaging works of art that attempt to capture the energy that one feels when listening to music. He’s fascinated by creating strange imagery, characters, and worlds that draw the viewer further in, hoping to inspire their own imaginations.

About Mike Meares

Mike Meares is an artist Illinois-raised, California-aged, and still relatively new to Indy. Meares graduated from a top secret, or “unimpressive state school,” with a BFA in Studio Art about a thousand years ago. Shortly after his college years, he abandoned the idea of an MFA program and moved to San Francisco to find his creative self and to pursue art on his own. He and his family relocated to Indianapolis in the summer of 2019, settled in just in time for the pandemic. He’s been an FC9 member artist since then, and is now the events coordinator.

“Over the last few years, I’ve leaned hard into music as my main subject matter,” Meares said. “It is what inspires me most in this world, and I firmly believe it to be one of the few true forms of magic the world has. Think of the power that music has to inspire, unite, and communicate in ways that nothing else can!” Meares tends to work spontaneously in mixed media, including drawing materials, paint, and pastel, while often listening to music and seeing where the sounds take him.

His guest artist being a musician fits well with Meares’s usual body of work.

Peter Adriel Kennell was born in Indiana and raised in Eureka, Illinois. Graduating from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Kennell studied painting, music, and landscape design. His visual art and music draw upon folk traditions, myth, and literature; exploring the relationships between people and their environments. Kennell has performed his original music in houses, venues, and festivals across the United States and in Australia.

About the Full Circle Nine Gallery

The Full Circle Nine Gallery operates as an artist cooperative gallery, with each of the member artists and the board dividing gallery duties and artists roles. The artists will work together to help each other advance in skill and practice, as well as to bring success to the gallery. With over two dozen artists occupying a large, three-room space of the more factory-reminiscent portion of the Circle City Industrial Complex, Full Circle Nine offers a wide variety of art forms, media, and approaches.

The gallery has regular hours: 6-10pm on Fridays, 12-4pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Full Circle Nine Gallery is located at 1125 Brookside Ave., Indianapolis, IN, 46202, in the South Studios section of the Circle City Industrial Complex. For more information, or for artists interested in joining the Full Circle Nine, please visit www.fullcirclenine.com.