When was the last time you had fun at an art exhibition? Real fun, not just enjoyment, and no, I don’t mean the reception party or art as a play date background. I mean the exhibit itself, unhurried, uninterrupted, filled with laughter and surprise and sweet, sweet melancholy.
As I walked into the record store, er, I mean the gallery, I was once again that awkward and restless high school kid with a small wad of dollar bills burning a hole in my pocket.
On the walls was a whole new universe of possibility to explore. Twenty-six of Jersey City’s finest artists had been invited to create album covers for imaginary records. Forget the schedule, I’m taking my time and I don’t care where, goodbye, Rosie…
Here were the mellow morning guitar twangs of Cheryl Gross’s watercolors and coffee. Over there were some alchemical atmospherics from William Stamos. And looking right back at me was Tom Banks’ equally directionless young folk singer standing in the rain with candy-colored umbrellas and a burgled guitar case.
Some of the album covers, like the latter, were a loving imagining of titles by famous artists, some were pulled from thin air, and others might just be on the short run sleeves of long play discs from bands you’ve never heard of.
You can find playful, irreverent collages like those by Luis Alves paying tribute to Babs and other goddesses and a redux of Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ by Brad Terhune. Frank Ippolito fulfills his wish list with art for ‘The Thin White Duke’.
Just as in the good ole days, I could have stayed there all afternoon lazily enjoying new works from old favorites, discovering artists new to me, listening to and seeing their visions. The stellar line-up also includes Fiona Banks, Hannah Banks, Wendy Born, Miguel Cardenas, Karen Carattini, Erin DeLaney, Jim Fallon, Sophie Guedin, Geri Hahn, Paul Jach, Brian McCormack, Andrea Artemis Morin, Amy Neufeld, Jason Sagat, Leslie Sheryll, and Carmen Vega.
But the pieces that really took me out to my own private Idaho in the teenage wastelands were naturally from the angst-ridden eighty-eight grunge of Nanette Reynolds Beachner’s ‘Broken Record’, Barbara Seddon’s 2024 haunting hot orange heavy metal linocut ‘The Times They Are ‘A Worryin’, and the dark electro basslines of a bleached out post-apocalyptic daydream in nowheresville America on ‘Doomsday Tracks’ by Stephanie Guillen, scheduled for release in 2058.
One of the gallery’s three main co-conspirators (which also includes artists PE Pinkman and Nanette Reynolds Beachner), Guillen kindly took a moment to divulge that during the formation of the show there had been that one overwhelming and unanimously shared sense of purpose among the artists: they were having fun. And you can feel it.
Yet even in the midst of festivities we will always take a moment to remember those good friends we’ve lost and the good times we shared with them. Artist Brian McCormack, watercolorist, sculptor of one-of-a-kind playable art guitars and late director of Hamilton Street Gallery in Bound Brook, passed away a week after the installation of the show and the loss reverberated throughout the Jersey arts community. His submitted album cover, ‘Jon Waine’, is a tribute to a real, albeit short-lived, avant-garde art college band of the same name (after a French poet) and its co-founder, his partner in rhyme. Humor was an integral part of Brian’s work and life, so it is in this spirit that we raise a glass for our fallen comrade, he of the wide smile and the giant boombox.
And as even the best parties must all eventually end, tomorrow is your last chance to join in, from 1-4pm.
For more information: backroomarts157@gmail.com