Night Calls

Night Calls
Rebecca Norris Webb
September - November 2022
Aurora PhotoCenter at Shining A Light: Arts & Culture Series, Monument Circle, Indianapolis
Free and open to the public

Coming in September 2022, as part of the Shining A Light: Arts & Culture Series of Downtown Indy, Inc., Aurora PhotoCenter presents a public projection exhibition of photographer Rebecca Norris Webb’s series Night Calls on Monument Circle in Indianapolis.

Night Calls is an homage to Webb’s 100-plus-year-old father and to our Hoosier landscape. In these photographs, she retraces the route her father took as a doctor on his house calls through Rush County, Indiana, the rural county where both the artist and her father were born. The images feature beautiful scenes from his drives around the area, as well as portraits of people he helped bring into the world and others he attended. In addition to her award-winning photographs, this exhibition features poetry voiced by Norris Webb. The work is a quiet, serene reflection on life and nature, and on the artist’s love of home and family.

This exhibition of Night Calls is generously funded through Shining A Light: Arts & Culture Series with Downtown Indy, Inc. and the Indiana War Memorials Commission. This projection piece was produced specifically for the Monument Circle outdoor architectural projection system. Night Calls is Aurora’s first collaboration with Downtown Indy, Inc., Innovative, Inc., and Dodd Technologies, the teams that helped bring this project to Monument Circle.

Of the project, Norris Webb said, “I’m delighted that Night Calls will be shown for the first time in Indiana, where both my father and I were born. It’s particularly fitting that it will be presented at night, which is when I often photographed, echoing the rhythm of Dad’s house calls. It’s my hope that this nighttime projection—as in a darkened movie theater—will allow one to imaginatively accompany me as I drive the sometimes foggy, sometimes stormy country roads of Rush County, with notions of caretaking, landscape, memory, and my father very much on my mind. As I addressed him in one of the text pieces:

You taught me to accept whatever came to the door: a bushel of corn, two porterhouse steaks, a bag of bittersweet horehound candy—your favorite—and the suffering each of us carry, sometimes nearly hidden except for something about the eyes. How heavy this homemade lemon pie, with its mountains upon mountains of meringue.”

Showtimes
Free and open to the public, screenings of Night Calls will be:

September 15*, 16*
9:00pm / 10:00pm

October 1*, 2
8:30pm / 9:30pm

October 7*, 8
8:30pm / 9:30pm

November 4, 5, 6
7:45pm / 8:45pm / 9:45pm

November 17, 18, 19
7:45pm / 8:45pm / 9:45pm

*Additional programming for Night Calls available on these nights. Please see below.

Artist Talk with Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb
On October 1, 6:30pm, at Herron School of Art’s Basile Center, Norris Webb and her creative partner and husband Alex Webb will give a talk about their work, providing context for the Night Calls project and touching on series including Violet Isle, My Dakota, and La Calle. The artists will answer questions from the audience at the end of the presentation. After the talk, at 8:30PM, attendees can view the Night Calls projection on Monument Circle.

For more information about this event, please click here.

Night Calls + SPARK
On September 15 and 16 from 8-9pm and October 7 from 7:30-8:30pm, Mary Goodwin from Aurora PhotoCenter will be in the Spark project space on Monument Circle to give a short presentation about Night Calls and answer any questions about the project, before the first showing on those nights.

About Rebecca Norris Webb
Norris Webb is interested in exploring the complicated relationship between people and the natural world. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY, among others. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Time, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde Magazine, The Guardian, and the New York Times Magazine.

Originally a poet, Norris Webb often interweaves text and photographs in her nine books, most notably with her third book, My Dakota, an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly, with a solo exhibition of the work at the Cleveland Museum of Art in summer 2015. The book was selected as one of best photography books of 2012 by PDN, Photo-Eye, and Time. A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, she often collaborates on books and exhibitions with her husband and creative partner, the photographer Alex Webb, including Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba, and most recently, Brooklyn: The City Within, published in September 2019 by Aperture, and Waves, published by Radius this summer.

Thanks to the following for this Night Calls presentation:

Funded by Shining A Light: Arts & Culture Series with Downtown Indy, Inc. and the Indiana War Memorials Commission
Courtney Howell Rissman, Downtown Indy, Inc.
Shawn Mollet & David Armstrong, Innovative, Inc.
Jeremy Fliss, Dodd Technologies
Mary Goodwin, Aurora PhotoCenter
Rebecca Norris Webb & Alex Webb (webbnorriswebb.co)
Music: Piano Echo, Julian Hamlin & Edmond Joliffe
Natasha Lehner, MFA candidate, Duke University
Radius Books (radiusbooks.org), for donating some 100 copies of Norris Webb’s Night Calls book to both university and public libraries around Indiana.

This exhibition of Night Calls is funded through Shining A Light: Arts & Culture Series with Downtown Indy, Inc. and the Indiana War Memorials Commission.

Annual operating support for Aurora PhotoCenter provided by the City of Indianapolis through the Indy Arts Council. Additional support provided by the Efroymson Family Fund.