INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Suspended animation

Through April 20

“Can you ever have too much sugar?” Artist Kristina Arnold poses this question as a sort of explanation. Instead of giving us the answer, she invites us into her imagination, where sugar is a metaphor for an abundance of sensory information. In her installation “poly_genic,” on view at the Indianapolis Art Center, Arnold has suspended candy-colored plastic pods from the ceiling in a tangled structure that resembles a spider web gone wrong. What she wants us to see and what we ultimately find is reminiscent of a biological organism: as she describes it, “a matrix of cells, neurons, tissues.”

The real stuff — our insides, that is — aren’t necessarily pink, orange or purple, but Arnold’s vision of the body at the mercy of the bio-pharmaceutical-medical system is transformative: We’re meant to question, like Arnold, the over-use of medically prescribed drugs. As she puts it, “I question our cowboy medicine solutions that often deal with symptoms only, ignoring or exacerbating root causes and setting up a permanent tension between unsolved ill and cosmetic solution.” But this is merely a starting place.

With a background in public health and a second degree in fine art, Arnold has straddled both worlds intelligently and doesn’t make her assertions blindly. And yet there’s a light-heartedness in her approach to answering such big questions. The world she has created for us, which comprises an entire gallery, is delightful. Even the darker suggestions — a clear plastic pod sewn together with a furred creature inside, or a purple one encasing a crab, or crablike thing — are strangely playful.

The installation is curtained by clear plastic flaps with concave indentions sewn in, suggestive of the pods hanging inside — a doorway of sorts to this brilliant wonderland.

And it is a wonderland: a land of dark possibility seen from a perspective of subjective joy in the act of creation.

Arnold, who currently serves on the faculty of Western Kentucky University’s Art Department, is among several regional artists whose work is on view at the Art Center now. Such an installation would be challenge enough to mount, but this is just one offering among many. In the next space, Charles Caldemeyer’s “The Big House” is equally fantastical, with a miniature house that serves as “a critique of the artistic process itself,” as the artist describes: Small rooms light up as you peruse the structure, from Van Gogh’s famous bedroom to a gallery of notable nudes by artists from Botticelli to Picasso.

In all, these and the other exhibitions, including Other Worlds/Altered Visions in the main space, offer a full experience. All exhibitions are on view through April 20 at the Indianapolis Art Center, 820 E. 67th St. Call 317-255-2464 or visit www.indplsartcenter.org for information.