Gallery space for all: no experience needed

The MaCalla School, located near the corner of 10th Street and Indiana Avenue, is one of the oldest school houses in Bloomington and home to the Henry Radford School of Fine Arts sculpture program.

But also tucked away in this 103-year-old building is a 7-year-old exhibit space, called Fuller Projects.

Created in 2002 by a group of Fine Arts students, Fuller Projects is home to semi-monthly gallery shows featuring contemporary art in any medium. The gallery’s first November show is titled “5 Obstructions”  and opens at 8 p.m. Friday.

It will feature work from six students pursuing their MFA in sculpture. The show is themed around obstructions for both the artists and the audience members in the gallery.

“When we decided to show our pieces, we thought the Fuller would be a good space for that,” said Marla Roddy, an artist featured in the upcoming show. “It’s experimental and different, and we knew it wouldn’t be a normal gallery setting.”

Roddy explained that each artist took a piece of work they had created and remade it with five basic limitations. One of these limitations, she said, was to make the sculpture with a new material the individual artists had never used before.

The artists’ original pieces and new creations will be on display in the gallery.

“They are really addressing whether you can communicate the same thing without the material you take for granted as an artist,” Phil Haralam, Fuller Projects co-coordinator, said. “Everyone is adapting and changing in different ways, and using a new material allows for failure. It’s interesting.”

Shows such as “5 Obstructions” are selected out of a collection of proposals submitted throughout the academic year by Haralam and his co-coordinator Anna Simon, both graduate students in the School of Fine Arts.

“We’ve tried to be consistent with the organization’s mission,” Simon said. “We try to put on the best shows we can.”

That mission, Simon and Haralam said, is to provide anyone – whether they are an art major, student, faculty member or Bloomington resident – a chance to display new, experimental and collaborative art.

Each show in the small, 27-by-14 square foot space lasts only two hours and must be set up and taken down by the participating artists. Simon and Haralam said many students use the time constraint and space to their advantage by coming up with interesting themes and participatory ways to engage the audience in their shows.

Simon also explained that if included in their proposal, the gallery can be used in any way the artists want: from painting the floor and walls to rigging a sprinkler system which was proposed and used in the show, “Don’t Rain On My Parade” in April.

But Simon said the exhibits also reach beyond Bloomington. On Oct. 16, the gallery featured pieces by Indianapolis painter Philip Lynam and Bloomington painter Jeremy Brightbill.

“We want young, emerging artists,” Simon said. “We network to local groups, put out a call. The main thing we look for when considering a submission is if it engages us.”

Both coordinators explained that one of their goals this academic year was to take advantage of their own individual artistic backgrounds when selecting gallery submissions and promoting the shows.

Simon, who studies art history, and Haralam, a sculpture student, both applied for the volunteer leader position and together convinced SoFA they should work as a pair.

“We really compliment each other, we make a great team.” Simon said. “It’s cool because there has always been a divide between fine arts and art history.”

Simon and Haralam said they hope to bring not only a variety of submissions, but attendees as well.

“We’ve nearly doubled our fans on Facebook,” Simon said. “The shows are really about socialization and facilitating dialogue. It’s a venue for presenting new ideas and it requires lots of audience members for it to work.”