Fall 2015: Casey Roberts: Soft Power

Lula Cafe is delighted to announce our 2015 Fall show Soft Power featuring the cyanotype paintings of Casey Roberts. 

Roberts creates large images on watercolor paper coated with light-sensitive cyanotype emulsion. He exposes the resulting support to light with certain areas blocked with objects or prepared shapes to produce shapes in the deliciously mottled matte blue so characteristic of the cyanotype process. He works into the resulting photogram silhouettes further with other chemicals and with watercolor or gouache to create punctuated moments of color and suggest oblique narratives. The contrast of highly articulated natural forms and the simple graphic shapes of his hand are evocative of dreams and suggest classic children's book illustration.

Casey Roberts earned a BFA from the Herron School of Art and Design and has shown his work internationally. He lives in Indianapolis.

Please join the artist for a reception Tuesday October 20th, from 6-9 at Lula. Complimentary hors d'oeuvres and cash bar.

Summer 2015: Katara Mallory and Leslie Baum

July 14- October 20, 2015

Leslie Baum:

A Slower Dimension: Portals and Mementos

Katara Mallory:

Star Wars Drawings

For this show we have paired the work of Leslie Baum and Katara Mallory. Leslie Baum is an artist and educator who teaches at the Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner Foundation a center where artists with mental illnesses explore and develop their creative visions. We first showed Baum’s work in 2011 and soon after that she shared with us the incredible drawings of one of her students, Katara Mallory.

Over the past eight years Katara has made hundreds of drawings based on stills from the Star Wars trilogy. The drawings captured our attention for their bold, idiosyncratic forms, their confident hand and strong colors, and the clear, underlying enthusiasm of an artist for his pop culture subject – one to which many viewers will likely be able to relate.

Katara Mallory

30” x 22”

Marker and pencil on paper

We are pleased to have the opportunity to show Mallory’s work alongside the work of his mentor Leslie Baum. While the two artists work differs on the surface, the formal use of strong color and shape connect the two, as does a more diffuse thematic exploration of imagined access to other worlds. 

Leslie Baum

A Layered Time

54" x 54"

It is also worth noting how each artist approaches their respective media and ability to explore space and depth in two dimensions, whether in the paused, flattened frames from which Mallory draws, or in Baum's suggestion of space through flat colors and shapes. Mallory spends hours with markers filling in the dark black spaces of the page with organized, repetitive marks, while Baum explores a range of paint media from watercolor to spray paint on experimental surfaces and shapes which become 3-dimensional paintings or pop-up table top drawings. Space is represented physically as she gets away from traditional geometric boundaries but also each surface plays with the sense of depth within the paintings.

Mark Booth: Spring Show 2015

A Nautilus is Represent by a Gradient of Condensation on a Basin 

Lula is pleased to announce our Spring show for 2015, featuring recent work by Mark Booth. The exhibition features two related bodies of Booth's work. The first is a selection of exquisite new abstract stencil-and-airbrush paintings in which complex abstract geometries are layered over one another on paper in shades of gray and silver.  

The second body of work in the show comprises the most recent text-and-image drawings from Booth’s ongoing project GOD IS REPRESENTED BY THE SEA/THE SEA IS REPRESENTED BY AN IRREGULAR SHAPE (GIRBTS/TSIRBAIS). Each drawing in this series connects with the drawings that precede or follow it, forming a continuous list of successive, sequential, linguistic images. Both the drawings and text are improvisational and result in an interlaced series of dream-like images that manage to be at once funny, poetic, unexpected and beautiful.

A reception with the artist will be held on Tuesday, April 14th from 6-9 with hors d'oeuvres and cash bar.

Winter 2015: Over Under

For our Winter show of 2015 we are delighted to announce Over Under, an exploration of contemporary practices in weaving among four artists.

Samantha Bittman uses a traditional hand-loom for non-traditional ends, augmenting woven cloth with painted passages and disrupting the grids that make up a standard woven cloth with sewn interruptions.

Melissa Leandro uses high and low tech weaving systems to translate drawings mined from her personal history into cloth. The hand loomed work is used as a substrate to work back into with sewing, collage, cutting and melting. She also translates drawings into digital files that are then woven on a digital jacquard loom translating the paper and pen to pixels and pixels into yarn.

Christy Matson's weavings are done on a digital loom as well, allowing her to weave far more complex designs than would be possible on a traditional matrix, designs culled from her own drawings, translated digitally into zeros and ones.

Michael Milano's work in the show concentrates on drawings he's done that allude to and are inspired by the structure and design of a woven grid and the traditions and practice of weaving.

Please join the artists for a reception at Lula on March 10 from 6-9.