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Art Review: “Reaching for the Steal” DISTORT Show

October 7, 2020/in Eye Level, header, News, Visual Arts /by Tris McCall

DISTORT is one of the biggest names in Jersey City art, and I mean that literally: If you’ve walked around town, you’ve seen his name painted in big block letters on the many murals he’s contributed to the local streetscape. DISTORT is not shy about taking up space —- his mural by the Holland Tunnel is one of the hugest pieces around. You might conclude that he’s a maximalist, and in a way, you’d be right. But as the “Reaching for the Steal” show at the Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison Ave.) demonstrates, there’s more to DISTORT than mere volume and less distortion in the signal he produces than his reputation and his handle indicate.

The paintings and sculptures now on view at the gallery (they’ll be there until Nov. 1, and you can arrange a visit through the Deep Space website) reveal an artist comfortable working on a smaller scale and speaking person to person. He belongs to the city, but he’s also deeply aware of transcultural trends. As it turns out, he’s less a street artist dragged indoors than he is a traditional painter who shrewdly uses the visual language and energy of graffiti to shake the viewer up and increase his susceptibility to DISTORT’S emotional incursions. Almost everything about “Reaching for the Steal” alludes to art history and the artistic canon: I see refractions of the Mexican muralists, film noir, American landscape painting, surrealism, the Italian Renaissance, and much else. There are subway tunnels that resemble cathedrals attended by monkish figures in classic poses. There is at times a certain medieval flatness to the images. Plaster arms and legs protruding from brick surfaces are arresting and maybe a little playful, too; they also recall Robert Gober’s impish sculptures of distended limbs in strange corners.

How does DISTORT juggle these elements and harmonize these juxtapositions? Adeptly, it turns out. The pieces in “Reaching for the Steal” are unified by a prevailing sense of menace: These paintings bear arms. A child with weeping streaks of black on his cheeks rattles the bars of a cage. Angry-looking eagles hover over the crumpled blades of a crashed helicopter. Proud parents in lurid robes hand a toddler a rifle. A banker beneath a sky decorated with ribbons of pipe akin to those in the PATH tubes takes notes dispassionately as the city smokes around him. A great firmament of tombstones rises around the Philadelphia skyline. A woman with a baton is fed into a gleaming industrial drum that glows a toxic-waste green. Or maybe she’s just curious? Either way, the peril is palpable. Everything threatening — uniformed figures, guns, old-model cars with headlights on — is abnormally large. Everything under siege — the city mostly, but the natural world, too — is unnaturally small. DISTORT’s images may be dreamlike, but the emotional and symbolic logic that underpins his visual syntax is immediately legible. He’s painting a world in trouble, one where the power imbalances are massive and things are consequently falling apart and going up in flames. Our world in other words.

The other unifying force in “Reaching for the Steal” is DISTORT’s formal experimentation. The artist applies paint to metal, and he often engraves those sheets with short, straight lines of considerable nervous energy. The scratched texture evokes emotional distress and the disintegration of identity; it also looks cool and imparts instant weathering to small pieces that, unlike his murals, have never felt the sting of Jersey City a winter. DISTORT is drawn to reflective surfaces: Some of his painted surfaces positively gleam. One sculpture of three sleeping heads enrobed in folds of white plaster actually incorporates a mirror.

But there’s a limit to how far the artist wants to draw you into these works. Some of his reflections are akin to those you might see on a subway window as it streaks you away from the action. There’s a world in decay outside — you can see it and certainly sense it, but you can’t touch it, and you probably can’t affect it either. These pictures don’t implicate the viewer, which is generous of the artist; on the other hand, they definitely reinforce a sense of powerlessness before the crushing forces of history. One of DISTORT’s clearest visual points is that violence in art is no new phenomenon: It’s present in the classical works that we tend to misremember as anodyne. We struggle with the same fears that our Renaissance forerunners did. All the artist can do is stand slightly to the side and capture and communicate that vision as best as he (or she) can. Dramatic distortions are to be expected, and should they call our attention to the right thing, commended, too.

DISTORT

“Reaching for the Steal”

Deep Space Gallery

77 Cornelison Ave.

Visit www.deepspacejc.com

Art Spaces Adjust to a New Reality

March 27, 2020/in Diversions, Eye Level, header, Latest News, News, Performing Arts /by Tris McCall

Drawing Rooms was ready for spring.

The West Side gallery was set to welcome visitors to an extraordinary show: “Hands and Other Symbols,” a burst of color and imaginative design. Then came the pathogen — and with it curfews and closures.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do to move forward in the current climate,” says Anne Trauben, curator and exhibition director of Drawing Rooms (www.drawingrooms.org).

Like other arts leaders around town, Trauben is concerned about the future of the space she has created. The “Hands and Other Symbols” party at Drawing Rooms on the 14th of March may well be remembered as the last opening in Jersey City for a very long time.

The mood on March 1 — the first Jersey City Fridays of the year — had been hopeful. The gallery at Art House mounted an elegiac tribute to the late local painter Hamlet Manzueta. The SMUSH Gallery in McGinley Square allowed dancer and artist Myssi Robinson to decorate its walls with a dazzling array of sawtooth-shaped triangles. Pat Lay’s wry show, in which she teased religious symbolism out of computer processors, was still running at the new Dvora Gallery. All over town, the work on view was imaginative, provocative and playful, and there was promise of more to come.

Today, those rooms are silent. The global health crisis has emptied out the galleries and closed the doors of our creative spaces. Most of the arts institutions in Jersey City work on thin margins. Even in good times, it’s difficult to keep galleries solvent. Frozen in place and with few ways to act, local curators face an unprecedented challenge.

Some of the larger institutions have made a transition to digital-only exhibitions. MANA Contemporary (www.manacontemporary.com), for instance, has moved all of its programming to its website. Art House Productions (www.arthouseproductions.org), one of the older and more active arts organizations in Hudson County, maintains a virtual gallery, and continues to host activities and performances through its site.

“We’ve implemented some online programming which seems to be working well,” says Art House Gallery curator Andrea McKenna. “We had a ‘virtual story slam’ and Drag Bingo hosted by Harmonica Sunbeam this past Friday. We’re gearing up for another week with more programs.”

Art House attendees are accustomed to regular exhibitions, and McKenna isn’t keen on breaking that streak even if congregating is prohibited. The April show will be shown in the Art House vestibule, and the opening will be held at a later date. There’ll also be a taped component to the show that will be hosted on the organization’s website.

“My advice to my fellow artists,” says McKenna, “is to take this time to create. It’s the one that I have that truly centers me. If I’m in a good state of mind, I can properly help others who need me.”

That sort of communitarian spirit is at the heart of the SMUSH Gallery (www.smushgallery.com), but SMUSH, like most smaller Jersey City arts spaces, lacks the resources necessary to create an internet-only alternative to the brick-and-mortar McGinley Square space it calls home. For now, one of our town’s brightest lights has been dimmed.

“I’m not ambitious about replacing our in-gallery programming with online content,” says curator and owner Katelyn Halpern. “It doesn’t make sense for SMUSH to compete with organizations and companies that have really figured out how to do this.”

“Being a young, active arts organization took all our available work hours, and creating a contingency for long-term shutdown just never made the to-do list.”

For Halpern, running a gallery and performance space means physical proximity to other people — which is exactly what we’ve all been cautioned not to do. Halpern designed the space as a neighborhood hangout. With congregating discouraged, she explains, SMUSH can’t act as the facilitator of community involvement that it was created to be.

“SMUSH is about people being together with art and each other,” says Halpern, “and that’s not happening right now, so SMUSH is not really happening right now. We do plan to be back once this is over, but we’re also realistic about how unknowable the rest of the year is.”

Halpern isn’t worried about the immediate future — SMUSH just had its major fundraiser — but, like Trauben, expresses concerns about the long-term viability of the enterprise. For creators of small galleries like SMUSH, Drawing Rooms and Deep Space, the business is a labor of love: They’re here for the art first and the money only after that. Bayard, the prime mover at Eonta Space (www.eontaspacenj.com), agrees with Halpern about both the difficulty of transitioning to online presentation and a sense of mission that transcends financial considerations.

“When it comes to Eonta,” says Bayard, “money can just kiss my ass. Eonta is about art in its purest sense. We don’t charge anything, we don’t take commissions. And online is altogether too much work for too small a reward because art should be up in your face, live and in person.”

The spring Eonta show, an exhibition called “Multiply” featuring prints, marbling, and photography, has been postponed until the fall. Bayard is upstate for the duration of the crisis, and Eonta is on hold. Nevertheless, he refuses to get down, and he has some advice for Jersey City that’s commensurate with his status as a local provocateur.

“Create something beautiful, or not,” says Bayard, “but create a life that is worthy of living and that is worthy of art, and create art that is worthy of life.”

“Don’t be blue, be Yves Klein blue.”

Photo courtesy Drawing Rooms, from “Hands and Other Symbols”.

 

Header: Self-Portrait by David W. Cummings

Art Review: New Abstract Works by George Goodridge, Debra Lynn Manville, Orlando Reyes and Kati Vilim

February 21, 2020/in header, Visual Arts /by Tris McCall

Deep Space is an appropriate name for a gallery that focuses on new and unusual art. It’s all unexplored territory out there between the stars. Anything a space cadet might encounter in those vast reaches is bound to be strange and novel and worthy of scrutiny. There are other kinds of deepness too — intellectual depth, emotional depth, conceptual complexity and depth of vision — and Deep Space curators seem intent on creating an environment in which these kinds of creative activities can flourish. There’s also the way in which the name of the gallery describes its position on the map of Jersey City. Deep Space is technically located in the Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood, but it’s on the fringe of an industrial zone that has, so far, barely been touched by the great wave of redevelopment that has swept through this town. Their home is deep JC — a part of the city that isn’t included in the destination marketing.

Perhaps it should be. None of our cultural institutions are showing work any fresher or more vital than the paintings and sculptures that have recently been exhibited at Deep Space. If visual art is what Jersey City does best (and it is), Deep Space Gallery is right at the heart of local culture. Its owners have shown a pleasing commitment to affordability, encouraging those who aren’t collectors to dive in and buy a piece. Some excellent small canvases at the gallery’s recent “Gigantic Miniatures” show were priced as low as thirty to forty dollars.

Gallery owners Jenna Geiger and Keith Van Pelt have brought back two of the painters from “Gigantic Miniatures” for “Circle the Square”: Orlando Reyes, who’ll be immediately familiar to longtime followers of Jersey City art, and Debra Lynn Manville, who might not be. Reyes was the founder of 58 Gallery, a Downtown space with an offbeat aesthetic and a communitarian spirit that Deep Space shares. Manville runs a virtual gallery project called “1Million Diamonds” (1milliondiamonds.org) that champions abstract geometric work. They’re both participants in the local art scene, which is not uncommon for painters who exhibit at Deep Space.

Reyes and Manville are two sides of the square. The other participants in this well-balanced show are Kati Vilim, whose flat, interlocking fields of color align her work with Manville’s, and George Goodridge, whose twisting, pulling, and warping of canvas makes him as much a sculptor as a painter. Taken collectively, these four artists share an attraction to bold hues, striking shapes, and offbeat rhythms. But what really unites them is their tone. This work is cheerful but not overly so, playful and experimental but not ostentatiously so, gentle but never toothless. Like so much of “Gigantic Miniatures” — and so much of the best Jersey City art — these paintings are weird but welcoming.

“To Dream Of Paradise” by George Goodridge

The weirdest and the friendliest of the quartet is Goodridge, who dabs ameboid ellipses and perfect circles on canvases that have been stretched tight as a Navy bedsheet over balsa wood frames. The frames aren’t visible, but their effect certainly is: this isn’t unlike painting on a cloud or a partially melted marshmallow. Most artists’ focuses get sharper as their works shrinks in size; Goodridge is just the opposite. His vision is best realized in his larger pieces, which are so relentlessly pleasant that their scale never overwhelms the viewer. “The Complexity of Joy,” a sixty-nine-inch tall acrylic painting on a curved canvas, hangs over the show like a thought bubble stuffed with pleasant ideations. “To Dream of Paradise,” a smaller canvas, is a cooler cumulonimbus. It possesses the hovering quality common to Goodridge’s work. It drifts over the viewer, but it never imposes.

“Common Space” by Kati Vilim

Vilim’s paintings, too, feel like unanswered questions. There’s a surprising amount of action happening in these abstract, static panels. Her shapes often float on soft gray backgrounds: They’re curves that cling and repel each other like horseshoe magnets, dark Ls and cubes that lock together to form rectangular prisms, mysterious raven-black cutouts given dimension and a sense of heft by blue accents. Sometimes she makes her shapes leap off of the panels and jostle for position: In “Common Space,” a great blue hook appears to rise and slip atop a pink one. There’s a similar sense of crowding and vague unease in “Summer Blue Influence”: three large figures, tentatively touching, tucked into a tight frame. The most placid of these subtly turbulent panels is a single U composed of pastel-tinted color fields of plaster. It’s called “Something Like Happiness” — not all the way to contentment but an acceptable facsimile thereof.

“Havens” by Debra Lynn Manville

The sharp lines and crisp angles of Vilim’s paintings approach geometric abstraction. Debra Lynn Manville’s work goes all the way and even flirts a bit with the airlessness of corporate logo design. Fans of this style will recognize an enthusiastic practitioner with a steady hand for parallel lines, a good eye for gradients, and commitment to knockout colors. “Tysimmon,” which is painted on a wood panel, achieves a near-metallic shine, like the fender of an automobile under streetlights. “Usilia,” too, generates the illusion of curved space. Too rigorous and too precise to be called psychedelic, Manville’s work does lean toward the surreal: “Havens,” a leftover from the Miniatures show, is strangely suggestive of the plant-stuffed windows of a beachfront hotel.

Manville uses Flashe paint to produce a vinyl-like matte sheen. Reyes is after some attention-grabbing effects, too, and he finds them at the intersection of pigment and metal. By applying color to aluminum surfaces, he gets paint blots to open like flowers or corals. Tiny rivulets of color score these radiant circles of his. He achieves similar results on other surfaces, but the aluminum plates sing loudest. If you’re familiar with the artist, you’ll also be familiar with the effects, too, but even if you’ve seen them before, they retain their ability to startle. Walking past a wall of his paintings is a bit like a trip through a tulip garden: colors and contrasts, pinks and reds in bunches, bouquets generously bestowed, an overwhelming sense of plenty.

Technically, all of these painters are experimenting. They’re pushing at the boundaries of their styles, exploring the power of shape and color, taking chances, doing the sorts of things that an artist does when he or she is subject to the interstellar currents of deep space. Yet there’s so little sweat visible in “Circle the Square” that you may not even notice. All they ask of you is the same thing that all deep space cadets do: Have a little faith, detach from the mothership, and float.

Deep Space Gallery
Circle The Square
Work by George Goodridge, Debra Lynn Manville, Orlando Reyes, and Kati Vilim
77 Cornelison Ave.
On view until February 29

Header: “Origami Sea Owl” by Orlando Reyes

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News Briefs

Jersey City will file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Newark’s argument that a Police Civilian Complaint Review Board with proper powers should be allowed in NJ.

Josue Rodriguez, former pastor and religion teacher at the Jersey City church Temple Refugio, was sentenced to 15 years in New Jersey state prison having been convicted on two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault involving two juvenile victims.

Keep abreast of Jersey City Covid-19 statistics here.

Governor Murphy has launched a “Covid Transparency Website” where New Jerseyans can track state expenditures related to Covid.  Go here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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