Simple complexities

Sometimes the apparently simple things are quite complex. The latest installment of the roving art museum, iMOCA, is a case in point. Earth Air Fire & Water is a collection of four installations of conceptual art. While this alone makes the exhibit worth the trip — conceptual art, after all, is not a frequent occurrence in Indianapolis — there’s more to it than initially meets the eye.
What’s simple here? And, by turns, complex?

Bill Viola, ‘The Messenger’ (detail), 1996. Video/sound installation.

Jeremy Tubbs’ foam core, duct tape and surgical tape (if I’ve discerned the ingredients correctly) “car” is visually brilliant; it’s a car but not a car. The Nova sits life-size on its platform in all its pearly white grandeur, as lovingly put together as a vintage version that’s buffed and tinkered with by the car enthusiast next door. Tubbs has taken care to place it in context: The car sits next to a sidewalk complete with sewer cover.

While the piece is awesome, what may surprise more than anything here is the relatively unknown status of the artist. Sure, folks around these parts know Jeremy, or at least have become familiar with his name in group shows around town (Toys and Oranje, to name a couple). But this effort is clearly an ambitious one, and Tubbs, it might be guessed, is honored to share the gallery with the likes of Bill Viola, Patrick Zentz and Charles Gick.

Viola is perhaps the best known of all of the above: The Indianapolis Museum of Art made contemporary artworld waves when it purchased his DVD piece “The Quintet of the Silent” within the past year or so. Viola is the darling of the high-tech concept crowd — and yet his art is not the technology.

The Viola piece on view here fulfills the “water” portion of the exhibition title’s promise. Nestled in the far end of the gallery in a pitch black space, Viola’s “The Messenger” is a somewhat dated, but still compelling and timeless, video and sound installation featuring a naked man rising and falling through water Viola style; that is, in hyper-slow motion. For those who have never seen a Viola, it’s a great introduction to the artist’s prodigious talent. The video screen is much larger than life, lending it an eerie, disturbing quality. The slow motion action tricks the senses: We know a human couldn’t stay alive under water that long, and yet we also know the action has been slowed electronically. But still … Viola’s intent is to describe “the constant circulation of birth and death,” and certainly he succeeds.

Speaking of birth and death, at the other end of the gallery, Charles Gick’s “Drought Table” offers an equally conceptual take on life, but the artist instead ponders the changing landscape, or the lifecycle of the earth itself. A long table is set with a plateau of cracked mud, and beneath it lies swaths of dead sod. Videos on the walls facing each end of the table depict a person blowing into a bottle to make that deep, bellowing sound we’re all familiar with. Is the earth crying?

Finally, Patrick Zentz offers brilliantly crafted “machines” that interact with air. “Instrument for a Prairie Play” is called a “wind instrument,” and indeed it is: It’s a wood table mounted with a device that strikes varying lengths of vertical wood spokes according to the wind. Another equally intricate piece interprets the wind outside and strikes a corresponding guitar string. His other, more static pieces are equally elaborate and carefully constructed: “Document,” a table and framed wall piece, is “designed as a catalogue of material gathered from the landscape.”

Both Zentz and Gick have impressive resumes, as, of course, does Viola. Kudos to iMOCA and Herron for placing the art of Viola and Zentz, who also has a national presence (he’s from Laurel, Mont.), alongside the work of Lafayette-area artist Gick (who is making a national name for himself) and Tubbs, who is an emerging artist primarily on the local scene.

Art, after all, should not be hierarchical. And all of us have to start somewhere. What’s simple is rarely truly so.

Earth Air Fire & Water, a collaboration of iMOCA and Herron Gallery, is on view through Feb. 23 in the gallery at 1701 N. Pennsylvania. For more information, call 920-2420 or visit www.herron.iupui.edu. View images from the exhibit at www.IndyMOCA.org.