Graphite: digital catalogue
Indianapolis Museum of Art
4000 Michigan Road
Indianapolis, IN 46208
www.imamuseum.org/graphite-pub
www.imamuseum.org
The IMA is pleased to announce the launch of the digital catalogue for the exhibition Graphite, the first major museum exhibition to explore graphite as a medium in works beyond drawings. The show includes sculpture, drawing, and installations created over the past decade—including several newly commissioned works—by emerging and established contemporary artists. The digital-only catalogue is one of the first scholarly art publications of its kind. The catalogue features exclusive multimedia material to create a rich, interactive experience.
About the exhibition
Graphite is on view December 7, 2012, to June 2, 2013, in the IMA’s June M. McCormack Forefront Galleries. Among the more than 50 works in the exhibition, visitors encounter Carl Andre’s Graphite Cube Sum of Numbers (2006), composed of 164 units of machined graphite arranged in a geometric progression on the gallery floor. Kim Jones has created a new War Drawing that extends from an existing graphite on oil cloth work and depicts an elaborate battlefield diagram pitting “x” against “o” figures in an ongoing war of markings and erasures. Additional commissions include site-specific installations by Judith Braun, Karl Haendel, and Dan Shaw-Town, as well as new drawings by Joyce Hinterding, which engage the conductive properties of graphite to resonate to the local electromagnetic environment. Also featured are works from Robert Longo’s “Heritage” series—intimately scaled drawings of iconic artworks that have inspired and informed Longo’s practice. This open-ended interrogation of a medium demonstrates graphite’s shifting identity and provokes its reconsideration not just as physical matter that can be manipulated, but as conceptual material whose cultural connotations can be harnessed as well.
Artists in the exhibition include Carl Andre (b. 1935, American); Judith Braun (b. 1947, American); T.R. Ericsson (b. 1972, American); Dan Fischer (b. 1977, American); Roland Flexner (b. 1944, French); Michaela Frühwirth (b. 1972, Austrian); Karl Haendel (b. 1976, American); Joyce Hinterding (b. 1958, Australian); Christian Holstad (b. 1972, American); Kim Jones (b. 1944, American); Robert Longo (b. 1953, American); Adam McEwen (b. 1965, English); Geof Oppenheimer (b. 1973, American); Dan Shaw-Town (b. 1983, English); and Molly Springfield (b. 1977, American).
About the digital catalogue
The catalogue is divided into three major sections—Introduction & Essays, Artists, and Conversations. The Introduction features an essay by exhibition curator Sarah Urist Green on the metamorphosis of the material in contemporary art since the 1960s, and an examination of the material properties of graphite by Dr. Gregory Dale Smith, the Otto N. Frenzel III Senior Conservation Scientist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Artists section provides information about each artist and contextualizes their work in the exhibition within their larger oeuvre. This section is highly interactive, offering readers an opportunity to experience the artwork and installation through multimedia-rich documentation. Readers can watch video interviews of artists as they discuss their work in Graphite and their process. The Conversations section pairs artists within the exhibition with each other and outside scholars in expansive discussions that begin with each artist’s use of graphite. The results are substantive conversations that reveal the artists’ shared affinities and differences in their approaches to the material.
Multimedia content includes video documentation of a visit to T.R. Ericsson’s studio near Cleveland, Ohio, where he reveals his process of pushing powdered graphite through photographic silkscreens. Other video content includes the time-lapse development of Kim Jones’ intricate War Drawing and Judith Braun’s monumental wall drawing Without Pleasure All We’d Have Is a Bunch of Stuff Vibrating (2012). Scholarly essays are enhanced by high-resolution images and video figure references of works such as Richard Serra’s seminal film Hand Catching Lead (1968) and an animation describing the molecular structure of graphite. Along with extensive documentation of the works within Graphite, the digital catalogue also includes a photographic walk-through of the exhibition.
The catalogue is available to purchase on iTunes for tablet devices.
For more information, visit the IMA’s publication webpage.
