Featuring the work of Modesto Covarrubias, Ali Naschke-Messing, and Angie Wilson. The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, California, will present INDEXICAL MAKERS, featuring Modesto Covarrubias, Ali Naschke-Messing, and Angie Wilson, emerging artists whose work dynamically integrates form and content. The exhibition title, a play on the term “Indexical Marker,” refers to 2 key aspects of the work. The artwork is "indexical" in that it points to something else—it directs the viewer's attention to and often becomes a trace of another occurrence or physical object. “Makers” refers to the ways the artists employ craft-based tactics in their artistic practice. To refer to these artists as “makers” acknowledges the historical divide between the creation of so-called "fine" art, and the craft traditions of “making” objects, of “making do” with everyday materials often degraded by art institutions. Modesto Covarrubias utilizes knitting in his performance and installation pieces as a way to investigate psychological and emotional connections to physical environments. His knitting performances produce objects that serve as a trace of the actions of the performer, and his installations often engage the decor and design of a room, bringing attention to aspects of the space otherwise unnoticed by the viewer. Ali Naschke-Messing describes her method as one of extreme “site-responsivity.” Her thread-based installations poetically echo existing architectural forms or subtly chart the daily movement of light and shadow across the wall, ceiling, or floor. Her work is as much about the act of viewing as it is about the intricate form of her installations, as they require a form of patient looking akin to listening to a whisper. While they are definitely a striking beautification of commonness, they also hint at the infinite. Angie Wilson's primary medium is used work shirts, physical traces of anonymous laborers, woven into Persian carpet motifs or other craft objects. Wilson's artwork simultaneously weaves together questions of outsourced craft production, the mass production of the handmade, and the growing importance of re-usable materials. INDEXICAL MAKERS are artists whose conscientious use of materials encourages us to patiently re-view our immediate physical environment, and to be mindful of the makers behind the seemingly simple, everyday objects within that environment. Modesto Covarrubias is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, currently residing in Berkeley, California. He works in a broad range of media, including photography, video, installation, printmaking, and performance. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at such spaces as the Galleria Civica de Modena in Italy, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery. He studied architecture at UC Berkeley, received a BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College, receiving a Herringer Family Award. Covarrubias's background in architecture influences his performances and installations, in which he investigates the experience of space, and how a space can both alter and be altered by one's mental state. Ali Naschke-Messing attended the University of Barcelona and Columbia University, earning her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and her MFA from the California College of Art in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited in California, Florida, and New York, and she has served as instructor and guest lecturer at institutions such as the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, CA, CCA, the College of Marin in Kentfield, CA, and in San Francisco through the Valand School of Fine Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden. She is currently an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, and was an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. Her work explores light, presence, and connection in sculptural form, and she often employs immaterial media such as perception, reflection, and refraction to make site-specific installations. Her work changes in accordance with a given environment, formally highlighting existing structures and forms, while hinting at the intangible. Angie Wilson was born in Tacoma, Washington and received a BA in Russian from Reed College in 2003, and an MFA from San Francisco State University in 2011. She is currently a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in Oakland. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area and in Oregon, and she has presented lectures on the formal and conceptual concerns in her art at San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA), UC Berkeley, and Reed College (Portland, OR). Her work investigates labor, consumerism, and the handmade to question cultural consumption while reflecting on traditions of re-use in the midst of economic crisis. Through repurposing and reconfiguring preexisting materials, she develops a powerful connection between her work as an artist and the anonymous labor of rug weavers and industrial garment manufacturers.