November 9 - December 8, 2024

Opening reception on Second Saturday, November 9, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.

Programming This Month

ONE NIGHT ONLY
November 9th
7-9pm, Front Backyard

Interactive Art Installation “Sexy Karaoke”
by Christine Crook
Gather in the backyard at the Front for SEXY KARAOKE- an interactive art installation- a collage of femininity, objectification, and decay. Step into a soft, flowery, wilting cavern, a garden of plush pink underthings, and SING YOUR HEAR OUT! Open to All! Love Songs Only Darlings! 

Front Backyard Video Projection 
“Catch and Release” by Lily Brooks

Rooms 1 + 2

Nasreen Khan, Nasreen as Imelda, as Olympia, as Venus. Digital Photograph. 2024.

Boodle Fight
Nasreen Khan and Bryn Jackson

Mixed-Media Installation

The “boodle fight” is a Filipino military tradition rooted in the precolonial practice of kamayan, a feast consisting of a wide variety of foods, piled high on banana leaves, and consumed collectively with one’s hands. The tradition, itself, is symbolic of the colonization of the archipelago and its peoples, and yet its rootedness in togetherness and abundance remains unchanged. 

Indianapolis-based artists Nasreen Khan and Bryn Jackson have collaboratively created this body of work, inspired by four images relevant to Filipino history – The Painted Prince, The Last Supper, The Igorot Sequence, and a Reclining Imelda Marcos – to address the impact of centuries of political and spiritual subjugation on Filipino peoples throughout the diaspora.  Using kink as a demonstration of consensual power exchange, the artists’ aim is to reclaim agency in self-representation, to denounce the ongoing exploitation of the Filipino body, and to embrace the contradictions, multiplicities, and intersections of mixed, diasporic existence. 

‘Boodle Fight’ is made possible with a grant from the Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund, awarded by Central Indiana Community Foundation and funded by the Herbert Simon Family Foundation.

Bryn Jackson, Touch Me Not #2, Giclee, 2024.

Nasreen Khan
I grew up in West Africa and Indonesia. My mother is Filipino-Chinese, and my father is Afghan-Russian. My work wrestles with the gendered faith of my childhood. Recently, I have been concerned with two questions: 
1) What might South Asian women be as Theologians and Artists if colonialism never happened?
2) How might I recreate historical South Asian women as Artists and Theologians lost to colonialism with an eye to aesthetics as a spiritual practice?

I mostly work in wood: burning, carving, and painting it. By using natural materials found here in Indiana, I explore what it means to be an immigrant artist. I had a very Christian upbringing but most of the nannies and staff that helped raise me were Animist. They taught me that what might be termed absurd or magical isn’t so easy to dismiss. Growing up in Indonesia, I saw people connecting with the spirit world. In horse dance rituals I watched people eat live light bulbs or put swords through their bellies—I would wonder why they weren’t dead. These people were connecting to something very deep behind their navels. That’s where my work comes from, the space behind the navel of the world.
nasreen-khan.com
@heyitsnasreen

Bryn Jackson
I’m a Filipino-American artist and curator based in Indianapolis who centers nature and the built environment as a means of unpacking and connecting disparate narratives, personal experiences, and material culture. I seek to develop and inspire a deeper understanding of the spaces we inhabit and the ways in which they express and inform the condition of our being. Through my practice, I hope to encourage a perpetual state of curiosity and growth in myself and those that I interact with, and as such, my process is often collaborative, organizational, and insistently interdisciplinary. Using sculptural, digital, photographic, and time-based media production to map my experiences and illustrate the realities and un-realities I navigate in my daily life, I consider my work to be an insistence upon a more ethical and equitable stewardship of art, artists, our communities, our ecosystems, and our histories.
g3tj4kd.com
@j4kd 

Rooms 3 + 4

Prospect 6: Local Lagniappe Front Gallery Member Exhibit

Front Gallery Exhibiting Artists

Anderson Funk. Ann Haley. Augustus Hoffman. Christine Crook. Dani Leal. Déja Jones. Diane Appaix-Castro. Elliott Stokes. Elvira Michelle. Ely Marshall. Kelsey Scult. Lily Brooks. Raina Benoit. Ruth Owens. Sly Watts. Summer White. Ulrika Matthiessen. Yashi Davalos.

Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Photography, Video, Animation, Installation