Lots of great visual arts exhibits this weekend

quartet of current shows reveals great art, superior curating, and in the case

of Gallery 924, a brand new space. Note also that this is the weekend Andy

Warhol Enterprises opens at the IMA. If you're not careful, you'll fall

behind! — Jim Poyser

A Hand in the Inadvertent: Paintings by Hugh Leeman

4 stars

ARTBOX. Hugh Leeman is an artist equally at home in the

studio and on the street. Originally from Logansport, IN, this young artist now

lives in San Francisco, where he has recently spent much of his time making

portraits of homeless people. He is something of a social entrepreneur in the

way he goes about this: Leeman imprints T-shirts with silkscreen images from

drawings based on photos of his homeless subjects. He turns around and gives

these T-shirts to his homeless friends to sell and make a profit — and he

gets their consent to use their images in his own work. He has interesting, and

possibly unique, mediums. In "Though I know you spoke I got less from what I

heard and more from what I saw," he took a blowtorch to wood to create a

portrait of one of his subjects, while in "Seeing my Thoughts off into the

Universe," he treated a block of steel with urine (his own) and boric acid

before painting on it and then sealing it with resin. The spectacular chemical

reaction caused by the latter treatment adds more than a touch of

"inadvertency" to this steel canvas. But the painting of the homeless subject

over it — like all the other images in his recent work on display here

— is photoreal in its precision and painterly in its conception. Through

Oct. 29; 955-2450; www.artboxindy.com. — Dan Grossman

Ben Johnson

5 stars

Gallery 924 at the Arts Council. An auspicious alignment of

"firsts" transpired as the Arts Council of Indianapolis unveiled Gallery 924, a

sleek yet rustic new fine arts exhibition space located at 924 N. Pennsylvania

St. The inaugural exhibition is the first major Indiana show by contemporary

glass artist Ben Johnson, a Cicero native who is the first MFA student at Ball

State's premier Marilyn K. Glick Center for Glass. The result of these

relationships is a top rate exhibition and gallery venue. The space is

dedicated to featuring Central Indiana professional artists each month,

explained Dave Lawrence, Arts Council President and CEO. "This is really a

space that came out from what we were hearing from artists – that they

really wanted a place to exhibit and sell their work." Johnson has created a

visually seductive exhibition of organic sculptures, vessels and wall works

that abstractly explore decay and erosion, cause and effect and interconnection

themes. Multilayered matte surfaces may challenge viewers' notions of what is

possible with glass. Johnson builds works with layers of blown glass that are

then covered in a pattern that is perfected after hours of sandblasting before

works are acid etched. A sculpture of tormented beauty, "Rubicund Host" has a

candy red, opaque surface with raised patterns and two opposing bulbous ends

sharing a central artery. Each end is sliced open to reveal interior cavities

invaded with proliferating white circular, tubular forms. Sunny yellow and

white, the hexagon patterned vessel, "Where is the Honey?" stands over two feet

tall and is both playful and strikingly sophisticated. Through Oct. 29;

631.3301; gallery924@indyarts.org. — Susan Watt Grade

Neighborhood: various artists

4 stars

Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA). Many of the

depictions of built environments by the six Los Angeles-based artists represented

here can be read as studies in estrangement from the natural world and even

from the notion of community — or neighborhood — itself. You might,

at first glance, see Alia Malley's photograph of an abandoned rail line

surrounded by trees as a revelation of an idyllic refuge tucked within L.A.'s

inner city. But the knowledge that this land will soon be destroyed to make way

for a railroad line's expansion might alter your perception of this photograph:

You might view it as a funeral portrait. Another type of death is explored in

Jennifer Lanski's "American Dream." Under each of 50 colored-pencil drawings of

houses from 50 states, Lanski writes the amount of hours working at minimum

wage that you'd need to have worked in order to afford the house in question.

Let's just say that the figures don't add up. And in Nikko Mueller's painting

"Channel," you see the largest church in Orange County, CA, depicted from

above, at night, looking like an alien creature on the prowl (Evangelical

mega-churches are thriving in this time of economic dislocation and

uncertainty), while in Shelby Roberts' black and white photograph "Imperial

Beach," the subject is the fence along our southern border that separates the

American neighborhood from the rest of the world. Through Nov. 20; 634-6622, www.indymoca.org. — Dan Grossman

Portals: Paintings by Dan Cooper

4 stars

Wug Laku's Studio & Garage. In Dan Cooper's painting

"Landscape with Barn and Dimensional Portal" (acrylic on canvas), you see a

bubble-like portal opening up in an otherwise calm, pastoral landscape. In that

bubble you see a dirt road leading to another horizon. It's Star Trek meets the

Hoosier Salon, though the painting might look out of place in the Hoosier Salon

but not on the cover of Analog Magazine.

Cooper's subject is the territory where religious belief and theoretical

physics meet. You see this aspect of his work clearly in his "Super String

Theory" which depicts five planets together — depicted shoulder to

shoulder, as it were — with red noodle strings painted, and equations

written, all over them. But the portals in these paintings also lead out into

new artistic worlds. That is, he plays with media in ways that are both retro

and utterly contemporary. In "Burn 3" (mixed media on canvas), he depicts a

young woman sitting on a bench floating over a reflecting pool in broad

daylight. She's gazing into a circular portal that opens to a black sky

punctured by specks of light. Cooper created these specks back in 1975 by burning

holes in exposed and underexposed slides. He had to wait three decades for

digital technology to make it possible for him to incorporate these slides in

his work and create this portal into his own past. Through Oct. 30; 396-3886. — Dan Grossman