The “Night Calls” gallery at the Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center brings a taste of rural Indiana to the University of Indianapolis.
Rebecca Norris Webb is an artist who grew up in Rush County and the pieces in “Night Calls” focus on where she and her father, a doctor, grew up in rural Indiana, according to Associate Professor of Photography Sarah Pfohl. Webb served as a mentor and teacher to Pfohl.
“The work is an homage to her country doctor father, he served the Rush County area for 52 years,” Pfohl said. “She went back through some of his patient log books and then retraced some of the routes that he drove to visit his patients while he was a doctor.”
Webb’s style of photography is raw which means she does not edit the photos, according to Pfohl. Normally in modern photography projects, photo editing is used to enhance pictures. Webb also strays away from collaging and compositing, she focuses more on collaborating with the world around her to create art.
The photographs are just one part of the gallery. “Night Calls” also consists of Webb’s handwritten poetry along with interpretive text to help give context to the pieces. Pfohl said Webb has distinct handwriting and when she was in undergrad, poetry is what she studied. Webb experiments with the relationship between image and text in her projects.
The gallery has been years in the making. Pfohl said the “Night Calls” project took Webb six years to complete. Pfohl worked with Webb and the Department of Art and Design to bring Webb’s work to the gallery; it took about three years to come to fruition. Gallery Coordinator Mark Ruschman worked with Webb to ensure the gallery was to her liking. It was a change of pace for Ruschman who usually designs the space for each exhibition.
“The exhibit that’s up right now, the artist had a very clear description of the way she wanted the work to be installed, the order of the pieces, the general distance between the pieces, you know, just the overall look of it, that was predetermined by the artist,” Ruschman said. “So any conversation that took place between myself and the artist was just to fine tune the details. Other times… the artist will drop the work off and leave it up to me to lay the work out.”
The target audience for the gallery are UIndy students according to both Pfohl and Ruschman. Their goal is to get students to visit the gallery, Ruschman said.
“I’ll do a painting show the next [semester] and I’ll do a sculpture show the following exhibition. So it’s always changing, which keeps things exciting, keeps things interesting and hopefully provides a benefit for everybody that comes through our doors.”
The gallery is on display at the Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center through Oct. 25, open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday except for university holidays. The artist reception is scheduled to be held on Thursday, Oct. 3, in the gallery and a LP credit lecture is scheduled to be held the following day on Friday, Oct. 4, in UIndy Hall, according to Pfohl.
