Practice Makes Mperfect
Big Car Gallery
Through March 31

“Felipe Dulzaides: Protest Dome Offshore”
Recent Projects
Through March 24

Their current shows are not connected, except in the sense of Big Car being a big brother of sorts (in a nurturing way) to the more recently conceived Recent Projects — the two Murphy Art Center entities being unconventional artist-collective efforts at bringing off-the-beaten path visual art (etcetera) to Indy audiences. Big Car’s Practice Makes Mperfect, a show of the graphic works (and T-shirts and adult-friendly goody bags) of Jason Pierce has an upbeat pop-art feel to it, while down the hall, Recent Projects’ “Felipe Dulzaides: Protest Dome Offshore” is a frenetically enigmatic installation recalling the San Francisco artist’s return to his native Cuba.

Pierce, who grew up in Indianapolis and recently relocated to Nashville, creates digital collages from retro images: a ’50s-looking woman smoking off the edge of the composition in “the feeling is extra large. it might crush you,” or two birds on a wire, one, like the “wire,” reversed out in white, while a suited gentleman looks awestruck in “you can ponder perpetual motion.” I particularly liked the decisive simplicity of “beef don’t come with a radio edit,” depicting a young girl blowing the purple petals off a flower. In each of these pictures, the eyes are covered by what resembles a strip of fabric, perhaps poking fun at the iconographic nature of pop art. These are not individuals, after all; they’re ideas, or human idea-forms. The overall effect is surprisingly unchaotic — unlike much collage art — and you couldn’t accuse it of being overly serious.

Down the hall in the Recent Projects space, I also had a feeling of déjà vu; here is one of those installation pieces that wreak havoc with notions about how immediately graspable art should be.

Dulzaides’ video projections of snippets of life in Cuba — a man attempting to throw a brick being hosed down, a salsa class on the beach, straightforward takes of the city’s monochromatic skyline — are like a montage of home movies, except that Dulzaides strips together different scenes, much like Pierce’s collages, in a sort of abstraction of narrative. Until we know for a fact that Dulzaides is inviting us down memory lane through his reflections on the present, the flitting images are confusing.

Like a portal to that other world, on another wall, a trio of illuminated arches — in blue, red and yellow — are a more pointed conceptual nod.

Taken together, these shows could be easy or difficult — depending on how you look at them. But both galleries are attempting something different. That’s a good thing. Visit Practice Makes Mperfect through March 31 at Big Car Gallery, www.bigcar.org or 317-450-6630; visit “Protest Dome Offshore” in the Recent Projects space, www.recent-projects.com, 317-504-8219, through March 24.