Thursday, February 2, 2012

On Our TURF

Visitors to TURF view one of the art installations presented by IDADA
in conjunction with activities related to the 2012 NFL Super Bowl.

This exhibit is Culture Is A Gun, presented byArtur Silva. 

The Indianapolis Downtown Artists and Dealers Association, 
IDADA, is a non-profit organization made up of studio artists,
art galleries and art related businesses located within
a twenty-block square area of downtown Indianapolis.
The organization is intended to develop and promote the pool 
of world-class artists who reside and work in Central Indiana.

Videos showing a waterfall make up the installation by
Greg Hull. Titled  Mediated Terrain, the artist intends
to inform the viewer about our relationship and perceptions
of our environment.

To that end, IDADA is presenting TURF in the weeks
leading up to the Super Bowl, an exhibition of installation, video
and experimental artwork by twenty-three artists, most of whom
reside in Indianapolis and the surrounding counties. 

Arthur Liou's Insatiable is a video presentation made up of
footage filmed at an open night market. Composited into micro and
macro images, the resulting image takes the form of  a massive creature,
moving and undulating through space.

The TURF Art Pavilion is located in Old City Hall. 
A beautiful example of Neo-Classical architecture, the building
is, in its way, as much a part of the exhibition as the art
it is housing until the Super Bowl; visitors gaze at the beautiful
stained glass dome in the rotunda and admire the wonderful
examples of scagliola that cover most of the pillars
in the building's lobby (When you visit, tap the pillars to see
which ones are marble, wood or metal).

Shown here is a segment of Better or Worse? by C. Thomas Lewis.
The artist uses the optometrists' standard question to explore
the nature of visual perception.

All of the exhibits represent the individual viewpoints 
of the artists, all of them interesting and well-done.
Visitors' reactions have been positive with 
many people visiting more than once.

The solar-powered cockroach shown above is a detail
from Waiting for the
Electrician (or Someone Like Him)
by Lori Miles.
Fanfare for Mayor Charles Bookwalter, is artist
Kipp Normand's tribute to the man who was the driving
force behind the development and construction of
the Old City Hall

2 comments:

Genie -- Paris and Beyond said...

Spectacular! How great that Indianapolis and the art community have put this together, a sign that there is more to life and society than football.

My favorite is that cockroach - amazing!

Bises,
Genie

Speedway said...

Thank you, Genie. The entire exhibit is quite nice and a tribute to the hard work of Mark Ruschmann and his cohorts at IDADA. Admittedly, I found the thing off-putting at first, but now I nudge it around its display area to show the little kids who come w/their parents. And if you'd like to have a solar-powered cockroach, enter that phrase on tho a search on Amazon. You can have one for $4.