The Big Car Collective’s Tube Factory artspace will enter 2025 with two new exhibitions on First Friday, Jan. 3. Here’s the information as posted by the Tube Factory Artspace this week:
* Benjamin Berg: I Can See the Pixels / in the Jeremy D. Efroymson Gallery /
Jan. 3 – Feb. 23.
There are some seemingly bad ideas behind Berg’s exhibition I Can See The Pixels. For starters, everything is created using the 1980s-era GIF image format, which is hated by today’s IT professionals for its limited color palette and inefficient storage. Also, the source images are small and low-resolution. Worst of all, he forces his computer to use colors that are totally wrong, nowhere close to the ones it needs. What’s wrong with this picture?
Berg isn’t interested in doing things the “correct” way. He’s more curious about what happens when you do them incorrectly. He tries to misuse technology just enough to make it misbehave, but not so much that it breaks down entirely. Finding the right amount of wrong is a delicate balance. This GIF-based work requires countless screenshots and hours of sifting through those screenshots, cropping and resizing them, looking for the best mistakes, the most interesting failures. The exhibit features prints and large-scale projections of animated GIFs, accompanied by ambient plunderphonic music playing from two sets of speakers.
About the artist: Benjamin Berg is a multidisciplinary artist from Indianapolis. After making glitch music for several years, he started applying similar techniques to the visual arts in 2005, documenting his experiments on his blog. His writings from this period culminated in a series of highly influential and widely cited glitch art tutorials. By making technologies misbehave, his work challenges the assumptions built into those technologies, assumptions which are often unstated and sometimes even unconscious. He also releases music with his band Animals Within Animals, and solo under various names including stAllio! and Old Man Glitch.
* Circle Show / Guichelaar Gallery / Jan. 3 – Jan. 26.
The Tube Factory artspace is kicking off 2025 by sharing work of some the artists who helped make SPARK on the Circle happen at Monument Circle in 2024. Visual artists Katie Faust, Dillion Imel and Sarah Montañez helped lead daily activities of our work in the pop-up park in the Northwest quad for five months. Kris Komakech was one of our SPARK Artists in Residence. He created a Monument Circle Hidden Picture, led a clock-making workshops, and more.
About the artists: Kris Komakech is an Indianapolis-based multi-media visual artist who has been practicing his work for over 20 years. He is best known for his intricate maps and community focused clocks. He exhibits in non-traditional venues like grocery stores and community spaces. Komakech has also exhibited at The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Central Library’s Meet The Artists, Gallery 924 and many other traditional galleries and art spaces.
Katie Faust is a queer and non-binary artist located in Indy. Faust has shown work in the Indianapolis Art Center and at Indiana University in Bloomington. Faust’s work focuses on cultivating a sense of self beyond heteronormative expectations surrounding sexuality and gender. Faust is a recent graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington with a bachelor’s in studio art.
Dillon Imel is an Indianapolis-based artist and third-year Illustration major at Herron School of Art. Dillon’s work draws a lot of inspiration from the mundane moments of life. Sarah Montañez is an undergraduate photography student at the Herron School of Art and Design who deeply understands art making and theory. After receiving her degree, she plans on being involved in community art, education and cultivation.
SPARK on the Circle is an ongoing partnership between Big Car Collaborative, Downtown Indy, Inc., the City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, and the Indiana War Memorials Commission, and is funded by the Capital Improvement Board. At Big Car, we approach our work at the Circle as a site- and community-specific socially engaged art and creative placemaking project.
Exhibitions continuing at the Tube Factory include:
* Julie Xiao: A Journey / Main Gallery / through Feb. 23.
Thirty-foot-long scrolls telling a story of self-acceptance and belonging fill the gallery for A Journey. The “Jellyfish Person” is the central character in Xiao’s large-scale ink and gouache works. The audience follows — and may identify with Jellyfish’s pursuit of finding a place to feel welcomed at, to fit in, and to feel at home.
* Wong Kit Yi: Inner Voice Transplant / Video Room. Through Feb. 23.
Inner Voice Transplant explores the links between subjects as disparate as ancient Egyptian practices of dream interpretation; jiāngshī (Chinese hopping vampires); and the first voice-box transplant, which took place at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998. These inquiries are connected through her signature video essay mode, which incorporates newly composed songs with karaoke-style running subtitles into associative, essayistic narratives.
See the exhibits at Tube Factory, Wednesdays – Fridays, 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays, 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. with Normal Coffee open during all of these hours. The Tube Factory is closed on holidays. Exhibits are free to visit.
