If a poacher was looking to stash an elephant somewhere in Jersey City, MANA Contemporary [888 Newark Ave.] is one of the buildings he’d consider. In a town where property owners sometimes worry about the presumption and indelicacy of scale, MANA is big, unashamedly so, with high ceilings, wide windows, air, light, and cubic feet of space. MANA gives curators an opportunity to do what they can’t do elsewhere in town: stretch out. It’s one of the only institutions in this city that truly has the capacity to accommodate our ambitions.
As it turns out, there is an elephant in Jersey City — the flattened front of one, anyway. Anthony Boone, a MANA studio tenant, a daring artist, and a man privy to the whereabouts of a reservoir of black paint, has parked his pachyderm on the eastern wall of the exhibition gallery at the rear of the Contemporary Art Center’s capacious first floor. There it presides over one of two roomfuls of audacious art assembled by curator Bryant Small. Though “Myriad” is up in time for the back half of Black History Month (it’ll be on view until the middle of May), its roster of participants is broader than the timing implies: Small has opened the show up to all artists of color presently working at MANA. Just as Maria De Los Angeles did last fall, he’s using residency at 888 Newark as his main organizing credential. And just like De Los Angeles, he’s managed to make a varied show cohere.
Though “Myriad” is one of the more complex shows mounted during this art-heavy month in the Garden State, it’s far from inscrutable. Small, a painter in alcohol inks that go to paper as vivid as stained glass on a sunny day, has never backed away from a bold approach, and he’s chosen artists whose gestures are… well, elephant-sized. The symbolic richness that has characterized so many of the shows mounted in New Jersey this month is here, but mostly, Small favors work that upends expectations — and maybe gives the symbols a shake.
Take, for instance, Boone’s animal, immediately recognizable as an elephant from its pendulous trunk and wide, fan-like ears. This impressive bit of urban taxidermy is as big as a blanket, and the shiny black paint that coats every centimeter of its surface imparts extra gravitas to already-charismatic megafauna. But upon closer inspection, the elephant head is not as imposing as it initially seems. Like much of Boone’s work, it’s comprised of disused and overlooked objects: shells and keys, strips of rubber, paper, sand, industrial what-are-theys. The elephant’s proboscis, which dangles from the wall, has a texture suggestive of a blown-out tire. Pointedly, Boone has left this piece untitled. It might have regal bearing, but it isn’t the king of anything. It isn’t about to charge — it’s been mounted on the wall. It’s a symbol of power, but it also communicates fragility, impermanence, and the order upturned.
The elephant stares across the room at another eye-catcher: Sunil Garg’s “Sleep Fragment #14,” a whirling cage of steel mesh big enough to enclose a tidy flock of chickens, or maybe even a diminutive human. The sculptor suspends his lattice in midair, sets it spinning, and bathes it in beams of colored light from LEDs strategically placed to achieve maximum saturation. As it whizzes by in a blur, an illusory transformation happens. It begins to suggest textures and states uncommon to metal objects: the shimmer of silky fabric, the flash of the mirror ball, the puffy, cottony quality of a cirrus cloud. Like Boone, Garg has taken a symbol of near-imperial grandeur and strength — steel — and, by reframing it, he’s asked us to look at it again, and afresh.
The other thirty works in “Myriad” aren’t quite as loud, but most of them tell similar stories. They’ll take a symbol of power and permanence, and, with some tidy adjustments, they’ll complicate it. Sometimes this is done ferociously. Danielle Scott sews images of lynching into the stripes of a wall-sized American standard, and substitutes the shiny butts of bullets for stars. “False Flag” is a powerful expression of outrage, and it needs no interpretation to make its point. The red, white, and blue returns in “Real-insistencia,” a linen embroidering in a wood frame by Jose Miguel Diaz. A message of resistance has been split down the middle as if it was slashed by a pair of scissors, and it is, quite literally, unraveling, stretched to a snapping point, and hanging by threads.
Other pieces foreground ambivalence, double meanings, and a bleak sort of play. Sajal Sarkar‘s tall, spooky vertical triptych could be a curved spine, or it could be a long queue of human figures, seen from a distance, and waiting on a long line that stretches into the darkness. Either way, a backbone has been perilously burdened. Lana Abraham-Murawski contributes two surreal landscapes; the small but loaded acrylic “Murky Waters,” a show highlight, finds room for a contorted, quizzical giraffe, a bespectacled human figure with an industrial pipe piercing his skull, and two faceless beings who are either drinking tea or snapping iPhone pictures on the edge of a placid sea. Then there’s the puckish Natalie Hou, whose “Emoji Cat” prints, made from old-school computer characters, provide wry, subversive commentary on technology and intimacy.
All those pieces are in the back gallery with the elephant and the spinning cage. The front room of “Myriad” feels like a playground for the imagination of Leandro Comrie, one of Jersey City’s best (and most mysterious) storytelling painters. He’s got four pieces in the exhibition, and depending on how you’d count it, that means we’ve been introduced to anywhere between seven and ten new Comrie characters. His Kahlo-ish portraits draw on Latin American traditions and imagery, but his scenarios are his alone — and they’re the kind designed to keep viewers wondering.
In “The Fury,” a shattering canvas created with acrylics and oil sticks, a veiled woman wearing funeral black bows her head over the reclining body of a child. She’s not alone. Another woman hovers over her right shoulder, and a man, straight-backed and stoic, reaches a hand to caress the child’s white shroud. Another figure turns his back on the congregation and stares out a window at a streak of blue sky. Everything in the scene feels perturbed: the flames of the candelabra, pulled by a wind blowing through the room, the drooping flowers, a golden bird fluttering in the corner of the frame, determined to escape the scene. We don’t know for sure whether the child is dead, but we are left with a deep suspicion that an injustice has been done.
The complexity of Comrie’s work fits Bryant Small’s vision. He’s selected intellectually challenging work, and he allows its themes — suspicion of authority, ambivalence about power, discontent in the face of injustice and inequality — to unfold at a rapid but legible clip. Though he’s not at the Jersey City Arts Council anymore, it’s nice to be reminded that the former Executive Director of the town’s grantmaking body can put on a show. That sure can’t hurt.
(MANA Contemporary is open by appointment. For hours, write to tours@manacontemporary.com.)