You can see that our homepage is pretty sparse these days.  Click the title above to read why.

After our current exhibit comes down in mid-August we’ll be closing down The 930 Art Center, or at least going into an extended hibernation.

Submissions deadline has passed

Phoneography by Mitch Eckert, and Angela Aguayo, Tabetha Anderson, Marcus Miers + Matthew Ballou, Laurie Blayney, Alicia Burke, Jan Burke, Mary Burks, James Calvert, Stacy Jill Calvert, Ian Carr, John Curry, Jared Davila, Sarah Katherine Davis, Michael Diaz, Leslie Doyle, Lacie Eubank, Martin Edlin, Katie Etheridge, Kristen Gilles, Michael Graham, Julie Gross, Chuck Heeke, Shadia Heenan, Gary Hellman, Jules Henning, Paige Hessel, Neal Johnson, Emily Jones, Kelly Karcher, David Kidd, Jesse Lightenheimer, Marlene Maxwell, Philip Miller, Adrian Jackson Minotti, Megan Mraz, Blake Oliver, Reid Olson, Alex O’nan, Brian Ott, Tristan Palmer, Rosella Pearl, Eron Plevan, David Sankey, Jenee Rue Sastry, Krishnan Sastry, Ben Sears, Terri Shaw, Brian Sigler, Jessica Speaks, Robin Tillman, Amber Estes Thieneman, Emily Thomas, Karina Tjong, Audra Todd, Emina Toric, Brad Walker, Kris Warning, Joshua White, Sara White, Morgan Wooden, and Megan Woodward.

Photography is ubiquitous. Now more than ever before a camera is in the hands and pocket of nearly every American. Mobile phones allow images and videos to be produced anywhere and anytime. Images are made “on-the-go” and the subject can be anything the photographer happens to be in front of. Images are taken and made immediately, especially with the advances of smart phones and image editing ‘apps’. A photograph can be taken, altered instantly, and uploaded to the internet within seconds of its capture. No longer does the photographer have to carry around a camera bag filled with gear!

Even established commercial and fine art photographers like Mitch Eckert are beginning to use iphones and similar devices to make photographs.  With the current technical quality available in mobile phones cameras, the phoneography trend is breaking away from mere gimmicks and becoming another viable tool available to photographers.

Mitch Eckert’s phoneography will be represented in roughly half the gallery, leaving the other half open for submissions accepted from the public.  (submission deadline has passed)

This exhibit aims to show that quality, artistic photography can come from a mobile phone.

Opening Reception Saturday April 7, 10 a.m. - 12noon with a discussion on landscape photography beginning at 10:30.

About
As an artist-photographer I am drawn to moments of both visual complexity and simplicity, and curious or peculiar beauty. These characteristics coupled with a strong aesthetic experience of place tend to guide the focus of my work. I believe there is dignity and purpose in our world, and these are qualities that I try to connect to in my images. Often times I tend to follow in a photographic tradition of straight photography. I feel that this steady approach to produce images with a certain type of honesty will result in photographs that speak to others on a deep aesthetic and emotional level. However, there are times when I veer drastically from standard image making into alternative processes and camera-less photography in the darkroom, creating unique pieces intuitively and artistically, exploring the range of the photographic medium.

“A Sense of Place, Revisited”
This body of photographs is, in some ways, a look back on the past ten years of my photographic work. Over this period of time I have often found myself drawn to exploring the region where I live, or travelling to locations to see what I might find. This is certainly not an uncommon practice, but my hope has been to translate these places, through the camera, in a way that resonates with my experience of that environment. And hopefully through this process, my photographs might reveal a sense of atmosphere or sprit to those who see them.

Another aspect of the work has been reconsidering the process of making photographs from the methods of ten years ago until today. Photography has always been a medium of change and adaptation to technology from the beginning. But it just so happens that one of those sea changes occurred over this same span of time. It has been curious for me to reflect on the path I have taken, from shooting to printing, and how the pendulum has swung in my preferences for how I might make a photograph.

More of Darrell Kincer’s work can be viewed at darrellkincer.com

Ranger: A new sound is on the rise. With strong influences like Metric, Radiohead, Feist,Florence and the Machine, U2, Fleetwood Mac, and The Smiths, a haunting, ambient sound is born. Stephanie Kincheloe, Derrick Royer, Jo those el Woodcock, and Kevin Buster thrive on irresistable vocals, innovative beats,and striking guitar work.

“Soft, mesmerizing, gorgeous, and haunting. We caught buzz-band Ranger…. and experienced all of adjectives and more.”—–Metromix, Indianapolis

Listen to Ranger here.

Rit Black & Co is the moniker of Joseph Dittman who recently transplanted to Louisville from Chicago, Illinois.  He plays piano-based original American fringe gospel and many 19th century favorites.  The album “Out of the Depths” was released on Christmas day 2011.

Listen to Rit Black & Co here.

“Matt Kinder (The Parade Schedule’s Frontman) is one of the best songwriters around anywhere”- Damien Jurado

“Matt Kinder’s sepia-folk style sets him apart from a lot of his contemporaries and his songwriting constantly captures loss, love, duty, and honor like few can. The Parade Schedule makes beautiful music that will stick with you like a familiar memory.” -Backseat Sandbar

The Parade Schedule has possibly played The 930 more than any other band due to their constant output of quality-crafted songs, but when lead singer Matt Kinder moved away to Seattle two years ago, he didn’t come back. Until now. The Parade Schedule is parading back to Louisville to give us a concert, and to visit with friends and family, and to record a new album. We welcome them back.

Listen to The Parade Schedule here on bandcamp.

House Ghost is known for making each of their concerts a unique experience.  Their surf-rock inspired indie tunes form the basis for creative performances with enough good humor to fill the room with joy.  During the first days of this year, they proved their awesomeness during a free show at The 930, so whether or not you experienced that, March 17 promises to be another vivid experience.

Listen to House Ghost here on bandcamp.

Ben Traughber will open with a solo set, pulling from his record “Spiral Stares” which came out in 2011.

Listen to Ben Traughber here on bandcamp.

On view Feb. 17 - March 25 

Opening Reception Friday February 17, 7-10 p.m. / Artist Talk at 7:15 / Free Concert at 8:00 by Ranger and Rit Black & Co

Artist’s Statement
By Joel Sheesley, 2011

I share the sentiment of Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” which speaks about “walking wary” of the chance discovery of content or meaning in everyday life.

“…With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts, …”

To me, the patching together of content suggests an arrival at a turning point; a point at which our pervasive tendency toward oblivion is dispelled by an awareness that the status quo, oblivion’s usual way of manifesting itself, is illusory. At this turning point one senses that everything is important. It is important for what it reveals about everything else. We find ourselves in an indeterminate network of relationships that keeps opening up before us.

But here our energies and intellectual powers are taxed. How much of that indeterminacy can one absorb? How soon do we, in exhaustion, begin trading upon trivialities, banal coincidences? The world offers an endless supply of facts. We are pressured to understand how they are important to us.

Which facts relate in ways that bring us insight? Which coincidental meetings are actually important? It is under the pressure to know these things that we feel the whole world groaning. Art is one such sometimes-exquisite groan. In whatever manner or voice, art calls out the relations between things, even subdividing the “thing itself” into its own sets of relationships.

Painting is one avenue in a network of roads that comprise what Art is. To be professional about painting is to know its history and technical detail, to be enmeshed in its limits; to “walk wary” with it in the world, alert to its capacities for patching together a content of sorts.

Bio

Joel Sheesley is a painter who lives in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated with a BFA in painting and drawing from Syracuse University School of Art, and from the University of Denver School of Art, with an MFA in painting and printmaking. He teaches art at Wheaton College. His work has been exhibited regularly in Chicago, including at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010, and in other cities across the country. Mr. Sheesley received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. In 2008 Mr. Sheesley’s painting was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.

On view Feb. 17 - March 25, 2012

Opening Reception Friday February 17, 7-10 p.m. / Free Concert at 8:00 by Ranger and Rit Black & Co

Ryan Adrick (b.1979) was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His childhood was spent growing up in a military family, and moving all over the United States. He received his B.F.A. degree from Jacksonville University and his M.F.A. degree from Florida State University in 2006. He has taught courses at Florida State University and for the Florida State University International Program in Florence, Italy. Most recently he taught at the University of South Florida as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Photography. Currently he lives and works in Dayton, OH. His work explores the relationships that we form with those around us, the environment, and with ones self. His work has been shown regionally, nationally, and internationally. He has also received a number of teaching, scholastic, and artistic awards.

More of his artwork can be viewed at www.ryanadrick.com

To be bent towards the breach is to be compassionately drawn towards the brokenness of the world with the hopeful intent to redeem, renew and restore desperately impoverished communities.

“… Brooks Ritter offers one of the most intense and purposeful vocal performances I’ve heard in a long time.” — Subvergent.com

“Brooks Ritter sounds like someone on the verge of mega-stardom, yet humbly decides to offer sincere melodies … instead of indie-rock swagger.” — The Black and White.

The artistry of Brooks Ritter is a seamless garment. An indivisible blend of voice, musicianship and songwriting that is capable of communicating the wide range of human emotion and illuminating our hopeful, fallen, love-sick, grasping condition. His lyrics are insightful and honest, his music displays the rare kind of versatility that makes you think and makes you move, and his voice is an instrument capable of subtle nuance and supple power that glides effortlessly through the realms of rock, folk and soul.

Louisville, KY singer-songwriter Jamie Barnes grew up spending his Saturdays playing loud rock music in the garage and his Sundays singing four-part acapella hymns from the church pew. Graduating from the confines of car storage to various music clubs around town, adulthood found him taking cues from artists like Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Low. His lo-fi demos managed to make it out of the bedroom and onto the desk of the owner of Silber Records based in Raleigh, NC. By age 20, He had quit school, gotten married and had signed his first record deal. Two LPs and an EP later, Jamie built a small following in the college-aged market as well as overseas in Belgium, France and much of Scandinavia. His 2007 release, The Recalibrated Heart (released by NYC’s Sonablast Records) found its way on over thirty AAA top 40 lists, gained him top billing on stages all across the United States and earned his songs onto several movie soundtracks. Barnes made his Sojourn Music debut with his own arrangement of “Joy to the World” from Advent Songs in 2007. A year later, he became a full time music minister with Sojourn and focused more energy into writing tunes for the church. Now closing in on 30 years of age, Barnes’ latest offering, The Mercy Seat EP, is comprised of a few revised hymn texts, tracks of deep spiritual introspection and lamentation over the darkness of the human heart and the hope of light beyond its mortality.

“Raise your voice, chase away the ghosts.” So begins the title track from John Mark McMillan’s new release, Economy. A natural progression and a departure, McMillan’s latest album has moved away from the themes of death and resurrection that clothed The Medicine to the interior psychology of a man trying to live in the uneasy valley between this world and the next, standing on the edge of the ocean of eternity, straining to see beyond the horizon line.

“For me, the greatest days-the birth of a child, the success of a career-have always been coupled with the worst ones-the death of a loved one, a friends’ divorce,” McMillan explains, “it’s a tension we all live in.”

On Economy, that tension is electric. From the first drumbeat of album opener “Sheet of Night” to the post-rock cacophony that closes out “Seen a Darkness,” there is a palpable weight that permeates the entire project. This is Gospel music run through the filter of the Southern night; this is electrified folk-the music of a man who cut his teeth on Dylan and Kerouac and Springsteen all the while haunted by the presence of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Economy is the sound of glory and shame, murder and grace, darkness and daylight and all those spaces in between. And it shows up in the songs-in the delicate beauty of “Love You Swore,” in the rowdy drawl of “Daylight,” and the quiet solemnity of “Murdered Son.”

For those following McMillan’s steady rise as an artist, Economy will not disappoint. Having grown as a lyricist and musician-this body of work finds the North Carolina-based artist at his most mature. And sonically, the album is far greater than the sum of its parts, served by the production team of Jeremy Griffith and Joel Khouri, and performed by the musicians that have supported McMillan across the world. The team has created a perfect accompaniment to McMillan’s searching, searing vision of a world that is “not as it should be.” But it’s not just a broken world that McMillan’s singing about. With Economy, he’s pointing out across the horizon, across the waters, to the hope of something much more than the devil’s “broken hearts and counterfeit currency.”

“We have seen the night,” John Mark sings, and then adds, “but we have seen the day.”

Kye Kye and Jude Moses open.

GET TICKETS HERE.

Opening Reception Friday January 6, 7-10 p.m. / Artist Talk at 7:15 / Free Concert by House Ghost at 8:00

Craig Hawkins received his B.F.A in Fine Art from Valdosta State University(2001) and his M.F.A. at the University of Georgia(2011). Hawkins grew up in multiple cities including Laurinburg, NC, Greer, SC, Roanoke Rapids, NC, Warner Robins, GA, Valdosta, GA, Newcastle, England, and Athens, GA. Describing his work, Hawkins says, “I collect moments of revelation and try to give them away as a drawing or a painting.”

Written by Emily Rosser for Daily Serving:

Craig Hawkins‘ work enhances the beauty of the world around us through the expression of a rich and deeply spiritual faith. Meditating on the word of God, Hawkins hones in on elemental truths of the Bible. The artist creates vivid imagery through transcendental compositions, high contrast narratives, and expressive mark making. The result is an intriguingly unique perspective on religious parables.  Hawkins describes his work as, “the evidence of taking truth and imagining it”. Brilliantly honest, his work moves beyond the confines of the canvas to provoke vivacity, challenging the viewer to see with new eyes. The artist uses paint and charcoal to illustrate and unite the dynamic nature of the world around us with specific scriptural references. Using media as a form of conversation, the canvas becomes an open journal to actively demonstrate the work of his hands. Each mark is wholly significant, a means used to thrust the viewer into a matrix of emotion. Through Hawkins integrity in creation, the viewer moves closer to the truth, feelings, and experiences of the body.