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Jasmine Pierik
Tris McCall

Threatened with Closure SMUSH Gallery Looks for Help

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SMUSH Gallery has never been about money. Many of the most fascinating things they display aren’t even for sale. The SMUSH crew specializes in interactive experiences: sometimes, they’ll even let you touch the art. While the work on exhibit at the little space on 340 Summit Ave. has often been priceless, nobody involved in a SMUSH show is there to make a mint. They’re no temple of commerce and transactional aesthetics. In spirit, the gallery and performance space is closer to a community center.

So when SMUSH shook the can last week, you can be sure that the arts community heard the distress signal loud and clear. Given their integrity, these gallery-runners would not ask for cash unless is was absolutely necessary for their survival. In their e-mail solicitation, SMUSH directors Katelyn Halpern and Benedicto Figueroa were blunt: they need to raise $150,000 to keep the space running at the lofty standard of quality they’ve established. The future of the Gallery, they warned us, would be decided over the next few months.

In the interview below, Katelyn Halpern refused to call her Gallery essential. I’m not so modest: I will. The loss of SMUSH would be devastating to Jersey City arts. Its absence might not be felt immediately, but its excision would leave a deep scar on the cultural map that wouldn’t easily fade. It’s the small, single-proprietor art spaces that provide this city so much of its peculiar character — and SMUSH, in particular, is deeply reflective of the personalities of the people who run it. There’s no other place in town like SMUSH: a genuine multi-media center crammed into narrow quarters. SMUSH doesn’t simply provide offbeat fine arts exhibitions. They also host dance shows (Halpern is, herself, a dancer), a film series, talks on community, tarot card parties and board game nights. And SMUSH shines a little love on a part of town that rarely gets any: the modest, lo-rise residential district at the far southern end of Journal Square.

Like all good upstart galleries, SMUSH has a commendable track record of nonconformity. They’re ferocious champions of the sort of gently provocative, defiantly uncommercial art projects that would never get the time of day from a gallery with an eye on the bottom line. Halpern and Benedicto provide homes for quality art shows (and artists) that simply don’t fit anywhere else. It’s hard to imagine any room in town accommodating Christian Gallo’s urban exploration photographs and assemblies of crushed spray-paint cans, or as deeply personal and irregular as Marta Blair’s shape-shifting, immersive paintings, or as quirky, ingratiating, and manic as Kate Eggleston’s sculptures, or as unorthodox as Buttered Roll’s walk-thru comic book in lurid orange, or as marvelously head-scratching as Myssi Robinson’s mirror-bedecked black-curtain “portal” into another dimension. “Bodies Boobies Bootys,” the SMUSH show on display until Apr. 23, extends the gallery’s fascination with the corporeal: it’s an explicitly erotic show that comes without a trace of coercion or distress. Instead, the gallery presents sex as it ought to be, pure physical pleasure, delightful tactile indulgence, and transgressive togetherness at a time of bodily fear. Because it’s SMUSH, there’s an interactive element too. Visitors are invited to color in the front mural with crayons. These aren’t even (necessarily) phallic symbols. They represent SMUSH’s absolute faith in the creativity of their clientele, and their belief that when you step through that narrow door, you’re an artist, too.

SMUSH will be hosting a community pitch meeting — the first of many — via Zoom on Apr. 26 at 7:30 p.m.  The link will appear on the SMUSH website.  If you’re shy like me, you might bypass the chatter, cut to the chase, and click this contribution button.

 

Tris McCall/Jersey City Times: From an outsider’s perspective, SMUSH looks pretty successful. You’ve done lots of memorable shows, and there’s interesting stuff on the calendar. Why make this fundraising call now?  What’s changed for you?

Katelyn Halpern:  In those ways, we are pretty successful! We do tons of shows with tons of artists, but would you believe all that activity doesn’t pay the bills? For the first four years, we focused on working hard for art and community projects and didn’t worry too much about the money. Personal circumstances made that possible, specifically financial support from my marriage. A lot of things didn’t survive the pandemic, including that relationship. So here we are.

TMC: Some of the smaller rooms that give Jersey City so much of its character haven’t come back from pandemic-era closure. Even the big players seem like they’re in transition. MANA is renovating, and Art House doesn’t have a home at the moment. Do things seem particularly unstable to you right now?

KH: They do. There’s a lot of uncertainty and not a lot of consistent support. Everyone is trying to find their way — I was going to say after the pandemic, but it’s really through it, still.

Benedicto Figueroa: I think this instability has caused a sense of disconnectedness between everyone, too.

KH:Which is just another kind of instability. It makes sense that things would be unstable. The pandemic is one of the causes of that, yes, but Jersey City is developing so rapidly the ground is changing under all of our feet all the time. And instability isn’t all bad — it opens the way for change, sometimes very good change, like bringing Ben on as co-artistic director.

TMC: Charley Cano from Outlander Gallery wrote on his GoFundMe page that his current location on Monticello is too small and too obscurely stationed to do justice to his ambitions, or to Jersey City arts in general. I’m not sure that agree that his current location is obscure: it’s right at the active end of a commercial street. Outlander is roughly the same size as SMUSH. Can a small gallery simply not survive here?

KH: I don’t know. I’d like to think they can.

BF: There’s an intimacy to the programming we do that doesn’t work in big spaces.

KH: I think there’s a need for the small spaces, but also a need for understanding that the social enterprise is worthwhile. Our governments need to understand that, and so do our neighbors.  So many of these spaces are personal ventures, which means they are especially susceptible to change. Changes in the personal ripple to changes in the organization and operations in a snap. There’s not a superstructure to support us, so we are continually vulnerable. There is the new Arts Trust — we’re optimistic about that support and have applied for survival funding.

BF: I think it’s important to note that the spaces that originally helped create the arts community we have were small spaces. These larger players are more recent arrivals. When they started out, they, too, were scrappy, weird little art organizations trying to give artists and weirdos a place to create and play.

TMC: Has the location of the gallery been a challenge? Do you ever wish you could be somewhere with more foot traffic?

KH: The thing is, we have plenty of foot traffic. It’s just not necessarily commercial in the way I think you mean.

I love the space. The room is beautiful and everyone loves how it feels in there. It’s not perfect for any of the things we do, but it does well enough for all of them. It’s also not a random selection — SMUSH exists in the direct lineage of SHUAspace, which occupied 340 Summit until we did. Would more commercial foot traffic help? Probably. But I don’t think we could afford to move somewhere with more traffic even if we wanted to.

BF: It also feels like being in the neighborhood is a special thing, rather than being on a main street, or next to a bunch of businesses, or the PATH.

KH: If we had an unlimited budget? We’d stay in the same place —

BF: But use the whole building. Use the backyard.

KH: Build out a sprung floor. Put a cafe/bar in the other storefront for pre/post-show and another gallery.

TMC: So if your fundraising campaign was wildly successful, you wouldn’t move to Grove Street, or, say, Paris.  You’d reinvest right where you are. 

KH: Yes. Unlimited money would go to more space. Limited but abundant funding would go to people. Artists. We’d pay everyone. We’d be able to have multiple full-time staff members and part-time staff, artist stipends, commissions, guarantees.

It’s interesting and ironic that the small galleries that you’ve called cornerstones of a healthy scene are not themselves healthy businesses by traditional metrics. Like profit and loss statements — or paying the people who do the work of keeping it going. This is the part that has to change if anyone small is to survive. That’s why we put out the call. We want people to know what we’re dealing with so that they can help keep us around if they want to.  We don’t feel entitled to anyone’s money and we don’t want to complain. We just want to be transparent and state the facts.

TMC: What neighborhood do you consider SMUSH to be part of, anyway? Is it Journal Square, McGinley Square, northern Bergen-Lafayette? Or doesn’t that matter?

KH: I say Journal Square. Technically, we’re halfway between Journal Square and McGinley Square, but JSQ is more instructive for people who are coming via public transit.

BF: It’s also so much easier to explain to folks traveling from other parts of Jersey City that it’s a few blocks from Journal Square rather than say “well, you can take the 87 to Bergen and Academy and walk down… and blah blah blah.”

TMC: What do you reckon SMUSH contributes to the neighborhood? How acutely do you think your absence would be felt?  Or can’t something like that be quantified?

BF: It would be a far less interesting window to walk by.

This is a neighborhood where people have been dealing with constant change for the last few years, taking hit after hit. Whether it’s all the tearing down and building of new buildings and condos or the changing businesses around them, they’ve got really important things to worry about. But I do think it’s nice for us to be there. And I would like to believe we are appreciated, even if it is just as a curiosity on your way to the PATH.

KH: I think the city and regional arts community might feel it more than the neighborhood. But this town has a short memory and tolerates a lot of loss.

We’re often asked to make the case for why our place is essential. SMUSH is not essential, but we believe it is beneficial and valuable. We’ve made space for some weird, wonderful things and kept the space incredibly accessible to artists and community members. We’re also operating with some of the most transparent and thoroughly applied equity commitments in the city — really thinking about the future we’re building in each action. They’re on our website, linked in all of our email blasts, and we engage all of our co-producing artists with them. We really are trying to “do the work,” as they say.

TMC: Whenever you read those breathless articles from visiting journalists about the buzz in Jersey City, and how hip and happening we are, do you ever think, hey!, they’re talking about us! Or do you feel like they must be referring to something or somebody else?

KH: I think they mostly don’t know what they’re talking about at all.

If they knew what they were talking about, they would be talking about us and Deep Space and Eonta and lots of other little spots. I think they know what’s in the city’s marketing and development material, but they haven’t come to ask us for an interview.

BF: They stick to the pedestrian plaza!

TMC: For as long as I can remember, there’s been an egalitarian spirit to the arts in Jersey City, which is great, but along with that spirit comes a certain amount of jerry-rigging. Art shows in parking lots, rock bands stuffed into bodegas, poetry readings in dim light in corner bars, you know what I mean. Are you of the opinion that there’s a minimum budget necessary to do art shows — and the more money the better — or are you of the old-school Hudson County opinion that art can happen and flourish anywhere, and under any conditions?

KH: Anywhere and everywhere, except people do need to be paid. Money makes it easier, and safer, and less likely to be shut down. But I’m a toothpicks and scotch tape kind of artist — and by extension, arts administrator.

BF: A light kit and fancy sound system are cool. But you know what?, a lot of times, it’s the bodega rock show that changes lives and makes the more lasting impact.

"Madame Pele," by Shamona Stokes
Tris McCall

“Mothership Connection” at Deep Space Gallery

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One of the refreshing things about visual art in Jersey City is its gender balance. In other cities, some of which are quite nearby, decisionmakers at cultural institutions are mostly male. Not so here. A prominent exhibition is just as likely to have been curated by a woman as it is by a man. Art Fair 14C, the biggest annual show in town, is staffed and run by women. The city’s head of Cultural Affairs is female, and the enterprise she founded — Art House Productions, organizers of JC Fridays — remains a female-fronted operation. The prettiest gallery Downtown is run by a woman, and the galleries at the local colleges and universities are, too. Although MANA recently named a male director, much of its 2022 programming has been handled by the female-guided Monira Foundation.  Many of the officers of ProArts, our flagship arts advocacy group, are women.  Politics, music, journalism, real estate and development: in Jersey City, as elsewhere, all of these are male-dominated fields. But visual artists can approach Women’s History Month with their heads held high.

So it’s no coincidence that many of our best known artists are female. Nor is it coincidental that so many of those artists have been able to double as curators, or organizers, or leaders. “Mothership Connection,” an all-female show that will run at Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison Ave.) until Apr. 10, features more than a few artists whose local prominence isn’t merely about aesthetics. This was not a deliberate choice by curators and gallery-runners Jenna Geiger and Keith van Pelt: it’s just how we roll.

Danielle Scott, for instance, has been everywhere lately, showing her assemblages at Bridge Gallery in Bayonne, adding work to the permanent collection at the Newark Museum, getting written up in Essence, and generally doing Jersey City proud. A year ago, she curated the inaugural ProArts group exhibit at 150 Bay Street, a politically charged show, and she tucked some scalding work into “A Message From The Underground” at MANA, the only 2021 exhibition that was more incendiary than the one she’d organized. Yet her three pieces in “Mothership Connection” feel hopeful: explorations of childhood creative potential that are heartwarming enough to decorate a birthday card. “Little Violinist” fits a gossamer-winged African-American girl with a fiddle too big for her and a large pink bow, fashioned from a knitting needle and affixed to the work with resin. The look on her face is fierce and defensive, but there’s a crown on her head, and the song she’s playing (the work re-purposes the sheet music) is optimistic. The struggle is real, but talent will triumph.

“The Queen” is less ambiguous. Here, the young girl is captured in profile. There’s a laurel wreath on her head, she’s decked in gold and seashells, and her forward-looking face is bathed in white light. In “Girl With Holy Water,” just by being herself, a young Asian-American defies the massive field of proper names that form the background of the piece. The type of the name-register is fixed in cold black and white, but the flowers that bloom around her are colorful, as is the parade of butterflies that stream from her head. Kendrick Lamar would certainly recognize the symbolism.

Scott’s pieces resonate with the tight, radiant circles on the opposite wall. Rebecca N. Johnson was the star of one of Deep Space’s most inspired 2021 shows, and “Mothership Connection” brings her back for an encore. Johnson’s pretty girls are situated in chrysalis-like teacups, vases, and planters; there, they’re watered like seeds, and flowers spring from their bodies and snake toward the heavens. This is femininity imagined as the wellspring of creativity, and Johnson’s paintings challenge the viewer to treat women with care, lest the vessel shatter and their generative potential be destroyed. Like the subject of Scott’s “Girl With Holy Water,” Johnson’s heroines have their eyes closed — they’re engaged in an intense personal experience, and they’re drawing strength from their interiority, just as all blooming things pull sustenance from the soil.

Petals, planters, and images of butterflies also show up in the paintings and sculptures of another Jersey City art citizen and community leader: Shamona Stokes, who is currently directing the effort to turn the studio spaces at Elevator (135 Erie St.), a recent Silverman Company redevelopment, into a hive of arts activity. Stokes has one of the most recognizable styles around. Her ceramic sculptures and watercolor paintings are a little bit fairy-tale whimsical, a little bit winsome, and a little bit evil. Stokes’s work is one hundred per cent feminine and invariably fetching, even when it’s unsettling. “Madame Pele” is a black container bursting with oil pastel blooms, which smear and jostle, bunch and ooze, and draw the eye toward the boisterous pink storm at the chaotic top of the image. Pele, as every Hawaiian (and Tori Amos fan) knows, is the goddess of the volcano, and Stokes’s flower-bowl version of the deity is simultaneously lethal and delightful. She affixes a displeased and angle-eyed face, complete with a cute but judgmental downturned mouth, right in the middle of the charcoal countenance. This adorable vessel of magma and ash cannot disguise its disapproval. Like many of Shamona Stokes’s pieces, it terrifies me and makes me laugh out loud.

“Lepidoptera,” the largest work in the entire “Mothership Connection” at 55” x 77”, depicts a butterfly — or is it a moth? — with a feminine body stained a deep, hypnotic black. Its featureless face is graced with two antennae that branch like dried leaves. These curl up on the bug’s brow, and resemble carefully styled eyelashes. It’s enveloping, it’s sinister, it’s pleasantly suffocating, and it’s even, God help me, kinda sexy. Just as Johnson highlights the earthly, elemental quality of her images by painting in lime wash, and Scott makes her surfaces shine with resin, Stokes incorporates salt into the wings of her butterfly, bestowing a marble-like texture on the paint, and imparting her distinctive combination of fantasy and firmness to her great girl-insect.

Stokes’ butterfly-face shows us nothing but cilia, Johnson’s shuttered-eyed women weep tears of water, Dena Paige Fischer’s concrete sculptures on thin wires, impassive as mo’ai, have shadowed indentations where eyes ought to be. “Violet Muse,” her most arresting piece, presents a face with the top sawed off; somehow its nostrils and mouth are still able to communicate haughty disdain. Cortney Herron’s heavy-lidded female subjects, with thick fields of earthtone color for their cheeks, never seem to engage with the viewer directly. They look to the side, or past us; they dare us to follow their gaze and ask us, implicitly, to be worthy of their attention.

Yet the knottiest riddle in the show is provided by Delilah Ray Miske, who teases us with mirrors, and productively misdirect our eyes around her beige-walled interiors. In “On The Farm March 2020,” a woman in a sweatshirt and camouflage-green hunting cap is occluded from observation by the angle of her body — she’s throwing a thick shoulder at us, and staring in the opposite direction. Only in her reflection do we catch her measure: she’s as guarded as can be, with a yellow scarf wrapped around her mouth and black sunglasses covering the rest of her face. This is a bit of pandemic-era storytelling, to be sure, but it’s also a comment on the elegance of inaccessibility, the lure of the woman removed, under wraps, untouchable and distant, yet always keeping a wary eye on us.

If all of this sounds regal, even queenly, well, maybe that’s only to be expected in a town with so many independent-minded female artists and entrepreneurs.  But “Mothership Connection” is never inaccessible. Some of it is remarkably plush. Sarah Grace makes flat but huggable pieces out of tufted acrylic yarn, and chooses quotidian objects to mimic, including a lighter with a flickering orange “flame,” a house key, a glass of wine with a squiggle of sulfite, a pair of asymmetrically appealing breasts. All of these hang near the entrance, colorful, squeezable, and inviting, like vertical welcome mats. Molly Craig’s work is similarly homespun, and similarly endearing, but she uses glass beads and cardstock rather than bunches of fiber to replicate a pair of ordinary objects that share a color — a bottle of Jarritos orange soda and the front cover of Eat A Peach by The Allman Brothers. Glass baubles, yarn, salt, lime: art on the Mothership is made from humble materials. Kelly Villalba’s beautiful baskets appear sleek, but they’ve been cinched together with rope and jute, with careful attention to the rhythms of the colors of the thread. Their roughness is an asset. They look well-used and well-loved; containers for the preservation of keepsakes.

Even the architectural pieces in the show (and architecture is a running sub-theme of “Mothership Connection”) feel approachable and lived-in. Miki Matsuyama brings us acrylics of interiors, including an image of “Georgia O’Keefe’s Studio And Fireplace” with brown desert hills melting in the sun beyond the panel windows. They split the difference between sketches meant to preserve a memory of a trip and illustrations a buyer might encounter in a real estate brochure. The glazed ceramics of apartment windows fashioned by Francesca Reyes, by contrast, don’t seem motivated to sell anything to anybody. They’re snapshots of the city, and tantalizing hints of the lives that might be led behind those thick urban curtains.

Then there are the continuing experiments in pure structure, committed to the canvas in blue oil and Venetian plaster by the geometric-minded Kati Vilim. Her paintings are, as always, dances of shape and color, set to rhythms of her own invention. Like many of the artists here, her work has been exhibited widely, including recent shows at the Monmouth Museum and NJIT in Newark. On the Mothership, though, she’s among fellow travelers — deep space explorers developing their own symbolism, their own visual language and logic, reclaiming their own particular materials and honing their techniques in a strange place in the galaxy, far from male supervision. And yes, by that, I do mean Jersey City.

"Everythin$ Is OK" at the NJCU Visual Art Gallery
Tris McCall

“Everythin$ Is OK” at NJCU Visual Art Gallery

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The newest on-campus resident at NJCU is a goldfish. It swims, blithely, in a small tank affixed to the wall of the Visual Arts Gallery (100 Culver Street). Nedko Bucev, conceptual artist on a mission, assures us that the water that runs through its little gills is filtered and thoroughly purified. But pointed like twin pistols at the globe are a pair of cylinders of industrial contaminants: white lead and black manganese. Should the thin glass crack and the chemicals reach the water, that’d be curtains for the goldfish. The animal lacks the capacity to realize that it is living under the gun. Are we any different?

Barring an earthquake, the fish ought to be fine. You and I may not be as lucky. Our innards may be as corroded as the mottled water pipes of “The Lead Drinkers”  that rise, sickly in their PVC sheaths, from the Visual Arts Gallery floor. That’s a grim thing to contemplate, but with the cheekily titled “Everythin$ Is OK,” Bucev and gallery director Midori Yoshimoto are pulling no punches.

Water pollution has been a near-obsession at the University galleries over the last twelve months. “Too Much,” a group show, included it in its roundup of the perils of overconsumption, and “Surface Tension,” a terrific show by Newark artist Amanda Thackray, wagged a finger at institutional litterbugs who cast their plastic into the sea. Bucev’s show lacks the poise of “Surface Tension” and the varied perspectives of “Too Much,” but in its single-mindedness, its intensity, its occasional crudeness, and its absolute refusal to allow anybody to leave the room without getting the point, it’s the most powerful show of the trio.

The goldfish isn’t the only imperiled living thing in the exhibition. The artist exposed ten identical plants to water taken from different cities and filmed the results — and if you’ve got the stomach for it, you can fire up an iPad and watch, in time-lapse, half of those plants wither and die.  He’s mounted ten brackets on the gallery wall; four contain healthy shoots, and six are empty.  It’s hard to ask for a bolder illustration of cruelty, inequity, and indifference.  Which of us get to thrive, and which of us are choked at the root by contamination?

Much depends, the show argues, on our street address. Bucev names names. He calls out particular towns (Hackensack is scolded for its pipes) and inefficient systems that work against healthy hydraulics. “Polychlorinated Biphenyl’s Travelogue” pinpoints a pollutant-heavy stretch of the Hudson River at Nyack, maps its contours, and festoons the massive image with QR codes should you wish to learn more about how you’re being poisoned.

Two things save “Everythin$ Is OK” from the science fair. First, there’s the fierceness of Nedko Bucev himself, whose outrage burns like a roman candle straight through the show, and eventually becomes part of the art. Bucev is no Mr. Wizard, diagnostically assessing the water table and encouraging productive change; no, this is Jeremiah in the pit, threatening the lives of innocent goldfish and pleasant-looking houseplants in order to get your attention. This is a highly emotional show, and the main emotion it expresses is sheer desperation at human folly.

The other distinguishing quality of “Everythin$ Is OK” is the medium that the artist has chosen.  Water is beautiful. It’s both reflective and transparent; it’s got texture and weight, it pools and swirls, it drips, streaks, and eddies. When it’s muddy, the sediment carries a story, and when it’s clear, it gleams like a gemstone. Bucev decants toxic water into drop earrings and glass bottle-amulets, and gets them to shimmer, dangerously, in the gallery light. His aggressive juxtapositions of clean and filthy liquid are political statements, but they’re also studies of refraction, gradation, and hue. “Left and Right Hand Water Glasses” is a condemnation of the policies that pump healthier water to Cherry Hill than inner city Newark. It’s also a lovely object to behold.

In all of these pieces, Bucev foregrounds his respect for water — its life-giving properties, its eternal qualities, and the force it generates. Sometimes, he seems terrified of it, scared of what it’s become in an industrial era. “Hydrant Games,” a silkscreen print, captures the rough silhouettes of kids playing on the street. Water fans out from the bottom of the frame in jagged pink streaks, piercing the bodies of the children, distorting and elongating them, as if they’d been seized by a blast and flung backward. We barely need to be told that the paint used to make the silkscreen is contaminated with lead. In Bucev’s world (which is, unfortunately, the world we all share), danger runs hot from every tap.

We’re disinclined to think about any of this. Unlike Nedko Bucev, we don’t want to view our water bill as abstract art or turn it into a tattoo. Buvic puts all his cards on the water table, and there’s good evidence in “Everythin$ Is OK” that his preoccupation is driving him a bit mad. In “W Side Effect,” a digital photo of the artist’s hands, he traces a W on his palm, and wonders in the curator’s note whether toxins have altered his body. The artist meticulously logs his exposure to tap water and worries about the encroachment of mercury (which he finds beautiful) on his skin. Lest he be accused of paranoia, he’s documented his research in a digital flipbook, footnoted everything, and included links to scholarly articles that are not too sanguine about the future of the human habitat. Unlike the goldfish, Bucev is aware of what he’s facing. But just like the fish — and like the rest of us — he’s got nowhere to go.

Works by Deb Sinha and Ben Fine
Tris McCall

“Coming Into Focus” at the Majestic Condominiums

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Plagues change the way we see the city. An otherwise innocuous scene of a crowded street suddenly looks suspicious. Bars and restaurants become hotspots. Residential towers begin to assume the character of fortresses. Because Jersey City felt the sting of the pandemic before other places did — before there was even a decent transmission model or treatment options for the virus — we locked down harder than many of our fellow Americans. It was the responsible thing to do, but we’re likely to suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms for a long time.

Yet our shared experience of trauma has also given us a common understanding. No Hudson County person could look at Ben Fine’s recent work and miss the context. Fine’s images of a depopulated city, captured from an apartment window, colorful, inviting, yet inaccessible, currently hang on the wainscoted walls of the first floor gathering space of the Majestic Condominiums (222 Montgomery). “Coming into Focus,” a two-artist show that pairs Fine prints with recent paintings by Deb Sinha, isn’t a parochial exhibition: it contains streetscapes of Paris and Recifé, Brazil alongside more familiar images of Jersey City. Nevertheless, it’s likely to be remembered by those who see it as the definitive Jersey City pandemic-era art show — one so tonally and emotionally accurate that it deserves to be called history.

Much of the credit for that goes to curator Kristin DeAngelis of Art Fair 14C, who has gotten so comfortable in the Majestic space that it’s starting to feel like her living room. DeAngelis alternates between Fine’s crisp, bright, specific daytime images, some with actual dates affixed, and Sinha’s portraits of the muted, eternal urban night. The effect is something like a pictorial calendar — the restless, relentless, interchangeable days of an invisible cataclysm, snapshots strung like lantern lights, windows opening on our collective memory.

The two artists work differently. Fine, stuck in his apartment during the lockdown, made aggressively vibrant digital paintings on his iPad of the world outside his door; he’s printed them in archival ink and he’s presenting most of them in twenty-inch frames as square as vinyl album covers. Fine’s squares defy the horizontal, rectangular norms of landscape and streetscape convention, and add to the feeling of involuntary confinement that his pandemic paintings radiate.

Deb Sinha, by contrast, paints in oil, and his works often do stretch out laterally. Vertically, too: “Abstract I,” chilly as a Whistler nocturne, captures a series of colored globes at the far end of a wet street, all under a midnight blue sky. As in many of his paintings, lights testify to human activity, but there’s no one on the road. Some of his other canvases will be easier for locals to pinpoint: the Kitchen Step on Jersey in a misty twilight, the Statue Of Liberty, small and frail under a heavy grey expanse, and the Dixon Deli, with its deserted corner illuminated by so many globes of light, it’s practically pointillist. In the gorgeous “Street Lamp,” Sinha gives us an orb that’s at once familiar and as strange as an arriving U.F.O.

What unites Fine and Sinha is the sense of curious stillness that radiates from their streetscapes, and the sense of an urban world in unwanted repose. Both artists present a city that’s beautiful, but also untouchable, frozen at a moment when authorities were quite literally telling us to keep our hands to ourselves. For months in quarantine, the city we saw through the glass was impossibly alluring, and also completely off-limits. Without moving an inch, we’d all become exiles in our own hometown. Ben Fine and Deb Sinha are the reporters who’ve gotten this grim story right, and if you have it in you to relive those strange days, this show will be on view at the Majestic through the end of June.

Curator Kristin DeAngelis will lead a tour of “Coming Into Focus” at the Majestic Condominiums (222 Montgomery St. between Grove and Barrow) at 3:30 p.m. today.

 

"Thank God, I'm Home" by Julie Green
Tris McCall

A JC Fridays Itinerary: March 2022

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Could the grip of the pandemic finally be slackening?  Or are we just nestled in a comfortable trough between towering waves?  Here in Jersey City, where we’ve gotten smacked around by an invisible foe for the better part of the past two years, guards are cautiously coming down: we see fewer masks on the street, fewer precautions, fewer hunched shoulders and held breaths. It’s premature, perhaps, to say we’re ready to party — chances are, we’re going to have PTSD for the foreseeable future. But the first Jersey City Fridays of the year feels very much like an event on the cusp of something, and a harbinger of turned fortunes. The art is less wary, less indicative of cataclysm, a bit more playful, more whimsical, maybe even cautiously hopeful.

"Floaters" by Lucy Rovetto

“Floaters” by Lucy Rovetto

It would be inaccurate to call it relaxed, though. Distress signals will still be visible all over town tonight. Nevertheless, the tone of the pieces on display at Art House Productions‘s citywide quarterly event has lightened. The subject matter has, too. After several seasons of grim, depopulated landscapes and signs of urban decay (not that I didn’t love it all; I sure did), the human body is back. Some of these bodies are in peril. Others are hale, boldly sexualized, and unafraid of contact. Corporeal as their interests often are, it’s hard to imagine the people at SMUSH (340 Summit) putting on a show called “Bodies Boobies Bootys” a year ago. Maybe we really are turning a corner.

The show at Firmament Gallery (329 Warren St., at Nimbus Arts Center) centers the body, fragments it, and reassembles it, and does it all (mostly) in the spirit of fun. “The Exquisite Corpse Show” is also a kind of game — or maybe a puzzle. Curator Tina Maneca has solicited paintings of female faces, torsos, and legs, shuffled them, stacked them, and presented them as amalgams of competing but complementary visions. She didn’t tell any of the artists who they’d be matched with; she’s simply built her women from the parts she’d gathered according to her own notion of what might goes with what. Maneca enlisted many of Hudson County’s most prominent female artists to play along with her, including Eileen Ferara, Cheryl Gross, Caridad Kennedy, Beth Achenbach, Alex Gulino, Theda Sandiford, and Art House Productions curator Andrea McKenna, who contributes one of her ghostly, distressed heads, hung from a wooden branch.

This sort of aggressive curation is unusual in Jersey City. Most show organizers worry about stepping on artists’ toes. But Maneca is simply doing what all good curators do: she’s drawing connections between works that might seem superficially dissimilar in style and tone, and creating juxtapositions to startle, delight, and entertain the viewer. She’s just more aggressive about it than many of her peers have recently been. The gentler Hudson County version is on view a block to the east. “Curator’s Choice” at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) features the work of six artists, including three pieces by Anne Novado herself, two in gorgeous, melting graphite. Everything in this show is beautifully barbed, especially Heidi Curko’s savage little circles and twisting brambles of black and yellow pigment. Tian Hui’s painted depiction of Deborah Harry, fierce and wary in a skull t-shirt, is similarly defensive and similarly striking. This is a show that opens with a double pane of artfully shattered glass. But there’s a sense of liberation in this work, too — a pure delight in the manipulation of materials — and that’s apparent in Eleazar Sanchez’s paintings, the otherworldly landscapes of Nathan Sullivan, and Megan Biddle’s remarkable, hefty concrete sculpture, corrugated and twisted like the folds of an accordion.

There’s a combination of post-traumatic exhaustion and steely reserve on the face of Hui’s subjects: faces long and filled with sharp angles, eyes distant but fixed, hair a bit straggly, all colors softened and muted by the torrents of ill-fortune. Lucy Rovetto’s painted figures aren’t dissimilar. “Floating,” her solo show, haunts the entrance lobby of ART150 Studios (150 Bay Street, 1st and Provost). Rovetto, whose work also appears around the corner in “The Exquisite Corpse Show,“ captures her characters in an in-between state, fading in and out of presence, sometimes taking on human shapes, and sometimes resolving to wisps of acrylic.

"Thank God, I'm Home" Julie Green

From “Thank God, I’m Home” Julie Green

More dreamwork awaits one story up, where Jonté Drew’s painted meditation on masculine identity closes in the ART150 gallery after a monthlong run there. Painter Guillermo Bublik (2nd floor, studio 225) has hit Jersey City like a spring storm, and established himself as a tireless producer of mesmerizing, immersive abstract canvases, some done on a giant, wall-panel scale, some tiny as a postcard. Even his non-figurative painting feels organic and in the act of blooming. He’s only been in town for a year, but he already feels like a local cornerstone; his work is on sale in the Nimbus gift shop. There are several open galleries on the second floor of 150 Bay — a place where every visit feels like a tiny Studio Tour. Bublik’s space feels like a mandatory stop, and our best opportunity yet to catch the measure of this consistently intriguing artist.

Even the mood at the two New Jersey City University art spaces has lightened — slightly. In 2021, the work shown at the Visual Arts Gallery (100 Culver Ave.) and the Lemmerman Gallery (2039 JFK Boulevard at Hepburn Hall) was harrowing, focusing on injustice, the endless tide of waste, and environmental catastrophe. This March, curator Midori Yoshimoto answers P.E. Pinkman‘s funny, savage, pained daily pandemic chronicle at Saint Peter’s (open tonight at the Mac Mahon Student Center @ 47 Glenwood Ave.) with a different sort of life-logging project. Julie L. Green, who became famous for painting one thousand last meals of death row inmates on ceramic plats, pointed her brush in a more optimistic direction during the last period of her career (she died in October 2021.) For “Thank God, I’m Home,” Green turns her attention to the first meals of the wrongfully convicted after their release and return to society. Sometimes she paints the certificate of commutation right into the image, along with the chicken sandwiches, condiments, and fast-food wrappers. Though none of these are rendered on ceramic, she cheekily borrows the aesthetic of high-end china, and generates some productive friction by placing motifs from classical European and Japanese art alongside contemporary corporate logos and signifiers of consumer culture.

Ben Fine "March 31 Before the Rain" and Deb Sinha "City Lights IX (WTC)"

Ben Fine “March 31 Before the Rain” and Deb Sinha “City Lights IX (WTC)”

Green’s work radiates compassion for the released prisoners, and for everybody facing the brute force of the carceral system. The activism that drove her to humanize the abject on death row is present in these happier pieces, too, and this afternoon, from 12:30 until 2 p.m., NJCU and the Lemmerman will be hosting a virtual talk with two similarly motivated individuals. Kirk Johnson, a former national correspondent with The New York Times, and Sara Sommervold from the Center on Wrongful Convictions will discuss imprisonment in America and the unequal application of justice. (You can register for the talk here.) But if the political implications of “Thank God,  I’m Home” are impossible to miss, so is the show’s granular, human-scale storytelling. Taken together, these paintings chronicle a social problem. Piece by piece, they speak of small lives crushed, and then restored, by the vagaries of fortune. The overwhelming feeling of the show is one of immense relief after an ordeal, and the thrill of eating hot French fries after a time when it seemed like French fries might be forever out of reach.

Painter Ben Fine‘s pandemic-era streetscapes do speak of a time like that — maybe not as desperate as days spent on Death Row, but fraught with enough indeterminacy and peril to last anybody’s lifetime.  In bright, cheerful colors and bold, confident strokes, Fine captured the Jersey City we all know, yet the neighborhoods were eerily depopulated, and the apartment buildings took on the guarded feel of a rampart. Jersey City was not designed to accommodate a siege, but a siege was exactly what we lived through, and Fine was one of the reporters who got it right. “Coming Into Focus” pairs Fine’s work with those of another poet of the haunted city: 150 Bay St. painter Deb Sinha, whose depiction of glowing lights on a dark Queens street was one of the highlights of the “Signature” show mounted at ART150 earlier this year. What song will these artists sing from the walls of the Majestic Theatre Condominiums (222 Montgomery Street)?  Something mournful for what we’ve lost, or hopeful, for where we’re going?

Finally, an addendum to a prior column: three weeks ago, I expressed my frustration about the Commuter Gallery on the concourse of the Journal Square PATH Station. Each time I tried to visit during the hours posted on the door, it was closed. I’m happy to say that since I wrote that piece, the Commuter Gallery has been much more reliable. I did manage to catch “Graff N Roses,” the solo show by 4SAKN, and I came away impressed. The artist, a master of wildstyle tags with a characteristically serrated style of lettering, demonstrated that he’s just as resourceful when he’s working with smaller pieces. His superimposition of graffiti over familiar images of the city — sometimes hanging in the sky, sometimes smothering the streetscape — suggested that he’s thought hard about the relationship between street art and the built environment. “Graff N Roses” is no longer up at Commuter Gallery, but a new show opens tonight: photographer Kurt Boone, displaying images of last year’s Mural Festival. This time around, I’m not leaving anything to chance. I’m catching the opening.

See you around town tonight,

Tris McCall

trismccall@gmail.com

Featured image: “Thank God, I’m Home” by Julie Green

 

P.E. Pinkman
Tris McCall

P.E. Pinkman’s Pandemic Chronicle at Saint Peter’s Fine Arts Gallery

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In confinement, people tend to count the moments. Prisoners mark tallies on the wall, hospitalized patients maintain running lists of daily medications, diarists scribble records in notebooks, penitents recite their morning and evening prayers. It’s a way of gaining some small bit of control over the ceaseless progression of the hours: logging as an assertive act, and a protest against the erosive power of isolation.

Visual artists log their lives, too. On Kawara, for instance, painted the date, every day, for years, in strokes of uniform white paint on small rectangular canvases. Plainfield artist P.E. Pinkman isn’t quite as monomaniacal as that. But the pandemic has provoked feelings of extreme destabilization and alienation in just about everybody, and Pinkman is no exception. “100 Days of a Pandemic,” a chronicle of loneliness and disintegration, peppered with occasional violent outbursts, is the centerpiece of “Seeing Someone Else Is Seeing Yourself,” his solo show at the Fine Arts Gallery at Saint Peter’s University (Mac Mahon Student Center, 47 Glenwood Ave.)

Curator Beatrice Mady has hung the series of images on the Gallery’s big wall: different versions of Pinkman’s face, one after another, scribbled with crayon, haloed with pencil, smeared with charcoal and pomegranate juice, tortured by too-happy Murakami flowers, divided, blown apart. Pinkman made one to represent each of his hundred days of isolation, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll identify with the obsessiveness, the blurriness, the desperate need to flee coupled with the sure knowledge that no matter how fast you run, you’ll never escape yourself.

Sometimes Pinkman takes refuge in sheer drawing pleasure, mimicking the styles of artists he admires; sometimes he tilts the face, like a listing balloon with a slow helium leak; and sometimes he lets it drop to the bottom of the frame like something thrown into a tank. He superimposes messages over his broad forehead and beneath his pointed chin, and these often speak to his anger and his immersion in inescapable popular culture and the endless news cycle. There’s little chance you won’t remember that 2020 feeling: an election bearing down, and viral particles afloat outside a sealed window, and indoors, everything coming unstitched.

Queerness is a major subtheme of “Seeing Someone Else Is Seeing Yourself,” and the show stands as a reminder that quarantine was particularly hard on those of us who rely on community support and identification in order to keep us whole.  Yet in “100 Days of a Pandemic” sexual identity dissolves under the pressure of the ennui and constant, nebulous peril of the global health crisis. If Pinkman’s face looks drawn and rail-thin, constantly on the verge of evaporating, well, didn’t you feel like that, too?  On the verge of a better spring (fingers crossed), it’s possible to view Pinkman’s pandemic drawings as a document of a terrible time in our lives that we might, very provisionally and very carefully, call history. The show, and the student center, will be open to the public during Jersey City Friday: March 4, from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m.; masks are, naturally, required.

 

Journal Square Path Transportation Center
Tris McCall

PATH Commuter Gallery: Serious Art Gallery or PR Exercise?

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It was mid-February cold on the concourse at Journal Square station. For the third time in a week, I was stuck outside the Commuter Gallery, across the concrete expanse from the Starbucks, right by the stairs leading down to the trains. The glass walls of the Gallery were decorated with the artist’s graffiti tag: 4SAKN, in white and yellow.  It occurred to me that if the tag had appeared on the station walls a few yards south, or on the floor outside the art space, that would have been considered a crime.

But the art was where the authorities wanted it: contained within a small box in a particularly charmless corner of the Jersey City transit network. I wanted to get inside that box. I could not. Every time I tried to visit the Commuter Gallery during the hours it was supposed to be open, the lights were off.

I had good reasons to believe I’d enjoy this show. I’ve admired 4SAKN’s work before — although rarely indoors. If you know where to look, his spray-paintings are on display all over town. 4SAKN is skilled at wildstyle graffiti: enormous tags with interlocking block letters, lines like thrown elbows, machinery-thick, a nest of characters, arrows and angles, suggesting three dimensions, stubbornly illegible to those who aren’t in the know. Wildstyle is the pinnacle of graffiti tagging, and 4SAKN is a practiced hand at it. Those serrated-edge characters and bold diagonal strokes of his — letters that seem to explode outward from an imaginary median line, right at eye level — have lit up concrete walls on warehouses all over Jersey City.

4SAKN also showed two smaller pieces in the best local art exhibition of 2021: “Walls To Smalls II” at Deep Space Gallery. That show was an attempt to transfer the energy of unauthorized street art to a liminal space, and it succeeded brilliantly; 4SAKN’s canvases, smothered in bright spray paint, did indeed pulsate with the same sense of rule-breaking exuberance that his outdoor pieces do. Yet they also felt gentle, almost comforting, and hinted at other dimensions of the graffiti artist’s vision.

Because I didn’t want to miss the show, I attempted to contact the organizers — and there are quite a few cooks operating in a very tight kitchen. The Jersey City municipal government, the JC Office of Cultural Affairs, the Mural Arts Program, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have all stamped their logos on the Commuter Gallery project. When I asked for hours, I didn’t get a response, which seemed like a bad sign. Finally, the PATH responded to a tweet, confirming the hours on the gallery’s door.

Tris McCall tweet

I didn’t arrive at the periphery of these posted hours. On my second trip, I deliberately picked the absolute midpoint of the Commuter Gallery schedule because I thought it would give me the best chance of catching a show I wanted to see. On another of my failed attempts to get in, I waited outside the Gallery for twenty minutes in the hope that somebody would open the door. Nobody did.

In all, I went three times during their posted hours and never got in.

How do the organizers behind this space expect rush hour commuters to feel when the Commuter Gallery is closed when the very sign on the door says it ought to be open?  Most aren’t going to care; they’re late for work, or rushing to get home, and they’re not going to want to stop at a gallery anyway. But a few will. They’ll be curious — and, in short order, disappointed. They may conclude that Commuter Gallery is just a hollow showpiece: something for the government and Port Authority to crow about during special events, brag about to the regional press, and neglect thereafter.

The hours on the door jibed with the PATH tweet

On paper, the Gallery is a nice idea. Putting an art space in the middle of a much-loathed piece of brutalist architecture that has contributed mightily to the un-walkability of the surrounding neighborhood does feel like a reasonable intervention in a bad setup. But if the art gallery is casually staffed and closed when it’s supposed to be open, it becomes just another metaphor for Grove Street’s continuing disregard for Journal Square. It makes the Commuter Gallery feel like part of a hype campaign: something politicians can point to in order to suggest that, on their watch, a working-class neighborhood is on the rise.

By now, the relationship between the Mural Arts Program, municipal authorities, and destination marketing ought to be blindingly obvious to everybody in the arts community. Yet many of our most accomplished graffiti artists continue to play ball, and that strikes me as bizarre and maybe even suicidal. The “reduction of graffiti” isn’t just one of the JCMAP’s stated objectives — it’s the very first one they list on their webpage. The government is happy to harness the talents of street artists and apply them to their ongoing publicity campaign, as long as those artists show that graffiti exactly where and when the city wants them to, and never color outside the lines. If you’re compliant, they’ll tuck your work in some antiseptic alley or a borderland they want to beautify, call for the cameras, and take a victory lap. After that, you’ve served your purpose and you’re on your own. If you’re lucky, when it suits them, they might just turn on the lights.

This is not the sort of column I like to write. I launched Eye Level to draw your attention to the many great shows on view in Jersey City and the fantastic artists who call Hudson County home. I don’t want to dwell on our shortcomings; that would be a far less useful exercise. But sometimes I’m compelled to be negative, and when that happens, it’s always the city government and its satellite organizations that force my hand. No small gallery in Jersey City would ever try to get away with ghosting visitors like this.  Only our municipal authorities do that.

They do it because they’re large enough to absorb whatever discontent their actions generate; if we’re locked out in the cold?, big deal. They do it because their instrumental, mercenary view of the arts doesn’t accommodate the sort of daily maintenance that a real arts space requires. I suspect they also do it because of their fundamental contempt for people like me and you. I’m not a critic arranging for private viewings. I’m just an art fan like you are, experiencing art in the same way you might. And in February 2022, this viewer cannot recommend engagement with the Commuter Gallery — not until the people behind it prove more trustworthy.

trismccall@gmail.com

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Foundation

Mana Contemporary Jersey City
Tris McCall

February 2022: State of the Arts

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A new director at MANA, Art House and 14C move forward separately, and smaller venues open

 

Art House Productions and MANA Contemporary ended 2021 with a flourish.  Art Fair 14C, co-produced by Art House and held in MANA’s underutilized, visually spectacular Glass Gallery, was a smashing success. MANA’s late-season open houses were crowded affairs, and a trio of autumn special exhibitions — “Materialistic,” “Color Continues,” and the incendiary “A Message From The Underground” — compared favorably to better-publicized museum shows on the other side of the river. Art House continued producing its reliably entertaining, city-spanning JC Fridays events. Our two biggest arts organizations had good reason to crow.

Two months later, both institutions are visibly in transition.  MANA’s galleries are closed for renovation. Art House and 14C Art Fair have parted ways.  And while their billboard still looms over the Turnpike North, luring drivers to Jersey City with promises of cultural riches, the Art House remains without a permanent headquarters.

Art House Executive Artistic Director Meredith Burns remains confident in a summer 2022 opening for the organization’s new home. When the lights come back up, Art House Productions will occupy its grandest space yet. The 20-year-old organization will move into the 41-story tower at 180 Morgan Street in the Powerhouse Arts District, lending some much-needed artistic ballast to a neighborhood that, no matter its handle, is still woefully short of art and artists. The new building, currently under construction, was developed in part by the Silverman Group (along with Garden City, NY’s Albanese Organization). This, too, is a good sign: the Silverman Brothers view themselves as partners with the arts community, and they’ve always foregrounded their aesthetic sensibilities. They understand the importance of Art House Productions to Jersey City, and know that we wouldn’t want to be without them for much longer.

Art House promises the town a 99-seat black box theater. There’ll be a visual arts gallery as well. It’s hard to tell for sure from the renderings, but my guess is that the new gallery will be larger, and maybe even sunnier, than the smart little room that curator Andrea McKenna used to run at the old Art House space at the Cast Iron Lofts on the Hoboken border. The Art House Gallery has been missed. McKenna’s last shows at the Cast Iron Lofts space were extremely strong, including an emotional tribute to the late JC artist and personality Hamlet Manzueta and a witty, immersive, historically evocative installation by Winifred McNeill.  Once this peripatetic organization (they’ve also been headquartered in Journal Square and Victory Hall) finally settles into its digs and declares its wandering days over, McKenna will surely cast her spell there, too.

The Art Fair 14C relationship, alas, does not look likely to be repaired. Burns blames creative differences, and describes the split as amicable. Nevertheless, it’s a setback. Art Fair 14C was a bigger undertaking than any visual arts event I can remember in Jersey City, and it definitely benefited from the coordination between the Fair’s staff and the Art House. That said, the 14C Fair held at the waterfront Hyatt in early 2020 was a pretty big shindig, too, and Art House wasn’t involved in that. 14C has already announced that it’ll be back at the Glass Gallery for its fourth edition in November 2022, so the relationship with MANA remains intact. Art House, too, will avail themselves of the Glass Gallery for the Snow Ball, their annual fundraising blowout party, on Apr. 30.  (Among others, they’ll be honoring Marchetto Higgins Stieve, the architectural firm that’s designing their new space).

As for MANA Contemporary itself, the renovation announcement had more than a few Jersey City arts scene veterans worried. Would the institution come back strong? Would it come back at all? Right now, there’s no new programming on the official calendar, but the indications are extremely positive, and there’s good reason to believe that the curators at MANA will soon pick up right where they left off. MANA has named Kele McComsey its new Director — and McComsey is an inspired choice. He was the curator of “Implied Scale,” the imaginative, opinionated, outspoken exhibition that took over the first floor of the building, corridors and all, during the spring and summer of ’21, and invited visitors to contemplate the immense unanswered challenges of the climate crisis. That show demonstrated that political engagement and aesthetic excellence could go hand in hand; it also showed that MANA, imposing as it can be, had a heart.

No architect has been selected yet for the renovation project, and the scope of the remodeling hasn’t been determined. But McComsey insists that the galleries will be back open in spring 2022, and promises shows similar in quality and intensity to those electrifying ones that closed 2021. And even during the renovation, activity continues. On Feb. 12, the The Monira Foundation — one of the institution’s most reliable creative partners — will be opening an exhibit devoted to the work of avant-garde Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas. McComsey imagines a MANA that’s better integrated into local culture than it’s been in the past, and given MANA’s combination of vision and deep pockets, that’s an exciting prospect.

A smaller, but no less respected, art gallery intends to re-open its doors this spring, too. Eonta Space, that den of mischief at the mysterious end of a McGinley Square cul-de-sac, has been closed for the balance of the pandemic — but they’re planning to rouse themselves from dormancy in April. Curious Matter, too, that tiny, beautiful Downtown gallery in a brownstone, shook off the torpor of 2021 and carried on its tradition of exquisite holiday shows. It’s not totally unreasonable to think that the global health crisis is finally abating. Flowers are budding around town; sooner or later, they’re bound to bloom. Until they do, I recommend a virtue not terribly common among artists, or art lovers: patience.

"Silver Glow" by Raisa Nosova
Tris McCall

Raisa Nosova shines in “Stripped” at PRIME Gallery

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Raisa Nosova makes glass look tough. Not invulnerable, not shatter-proof, but nevertheless load-bearing and substantial, hefty, sturdy as marble, with its claim to permanence made apparent.  Nosova does this without stripping her favored material of its essential glass-ness — transparent, cool, smooth, and a little dangerous. A peg could slip. A glass sculpture might fall and break into fragments that you might step on. Glass challenges you to think about your responsibility to it. It asks you to consider the potential consequences of careless behavior.

This tension between fragility and strength is underscored and amplified by the subject of Nosova’s glass sculptures. The artist makes breasts — human breasts, in a human female size — out of glass, adorns them with decorations, and hangs them on white walls. Nosova’s mammary sculptures are central to “Stripped,” a forceful group show that will be on view at the PRIME Gallery (351 Palisade Ave. between Franklin and Ferry) for the next three months. Tess Hansen of Curate NJ and gallery director Maria Kosdan have positioned the sculpture to catch and refract the overhead light. The thickness and unevenness of the glass, its curved surfaces that mimic the bulges and recesses of musculature, and Nosova’s general refusal to make things smooth for the viewer means that light is broken up into little pools and eddies and curlicues. Illumination passing through the glass achieves the quality of water. The glass itself, supple as it looks, also achieves a fluid quality, too. Everything about the sculptures suggest liquidity, which is appropriate, since Raisa Nosova uses actual breast milk in her art.

Raisa Nosova

Raisa Nosova

This may all sound a little on the nose to you. As statements about female resilience and the worrisome fragility of human biology go, it’s hard to get more blatant than a glass breast. Two things rescue her work from obviousness, and mark her, unquestionably, as one of the best and most fearless artists working in Hudson County. First, the objects she crafts are undeniably beautiful, and often quite clever, too. Her sense of play is apparent in all of her pieces, and her sculptures hum with organic activity: bees alighted on drops of yellow honey, globules of milk suspended beneath the glass surface, flowers painted in acrylic on the underside of the mammary curves. All of this is a little destabilizing — pretend insects on pretend skin — and that is part of the sculptor’s point. In one piece, she sticks a brass spigot where a nipple should be. She’s not afraid to take her metaphors to their logical conclusion.

Which brings us to the second reason Raisa Nosova is indispensable: her unflinching commitment to her concept. At a time when visual artists are, too often, content to be merely decorative, Nosova is motivated, and she wears that motivation proudly. She refuses to hide from any of the unsettling implications of her pieces: all the trauma, bodily harm, vulnerability, emotional peril, and life-giving fluidity of womanhood and motherhood, is right there on the (see-through) surface. Given the alacrity that radiates from her pieces, you can bet that Nosova has thought all of this through. Nothing about her pieces feels accidental. Her work is a very specific response to actual human experiences that many people have had, and it’s a joy to see an artist express herself so clearly and with such confidence.

The other three artists in “Stripped” speak in complete sentences, too. Tali Rose specializes in collage, and her superimpositions of salacious magazine models atop fields of mushrooms and beds of flowers do make their points about the popular presentation of the female form. But I’m just as impressed by her backgrounds, which are often weaved, elaborately, from strips of white and black paper, and create a gaze-warping mesh. Her two best pieces don’t even have any pretty girls in them: they’re forest images in which the trees are virtually swallowed by their pulsing surroundings. Kat Block renders more conventional forest landscapes and invites an orange-white sun to blast through her stands of rail-narrow trees. Kiki Buccini, who calls herself CutPasteFace, is the purest collage artist of the four, and her mixed media prints of a small, elegant woman, behatted and dressed in red, treading carefully on narrow paths beneath massive celestial bodies reinforce the show’s themes of female persistence and the challenges of the woman’s journey.

Nosova has other work in “Stripped,” too: portraits of young women that straddle the line between sexy and utterly shattered. In “Silver Glow,” the most arresting piece in a very outspoken and attention-grabbing show, the subject of the portrait is beautiful, but the colors are all wrong: her skin is pale blue, her lips are canary yellow, and her eyes are flame red. Is she at a club, lit by stage gels, leading a suitor to the dance floor with one provocatively-raised eyebrow?  Or is it that this woman is malnourished and mangled by modern life, defiant, unbroken, daring the viewer to understand her?  “Silver Clown” provides a clue. Here, the energetically applied slashes of paint and the distant, dislocated look on the face of the woman depicted are less ambiguous and more obviously pained. Her arm is swung, defensively, in front of her, but her hand is cupped. Best of all is a modest gouache called “Yuki,” with a woman looking down, eyes closed, the red of her hair giving way to the dark blue of her garment. It’s a study in quiet dislocation, and it’s undeniably gorgeous.

These paintings are strongly reminiscent of other excellent portraits that hung in the PRIME Gallery last year. Mr Mustart and Clarence Rich are best known as muralists and outdoor artists, but “Polarity” showed that they could capture minute expressions, quite brilliantly, on canvas, too. Mustart and Rich show us faces and bodies that have come in contact with the challenges of life in the city; Raisa Nosova’s does something similar, but from a distinctly female perspective. In its acknowledgement of struggle, it’s realistic, in its depiction of the ennobling qualities of existence, it’s fundamentally heroic. Nosova knows: we’re going to get bruised out there.  What matters is standing as tough as you can, and as proud as you can, for as long as you can.

trismccall@gmail.com

 

Jonté Drew
Tris McCall

“Signature” and Jonté Drew’s “Take A Breath” at ART150

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Did Piet Mondrian ever tire of painting quadrilaterals in primary colors?  What about Rothko; did he grow weary of those afterimage-like fields of melting pigment?  I ask not to be cheeky, but to point out something odd about canonical artists. They tended to develop a signature style — a particular thing they did, over and over, stacking refinement upon refinement, chasing a singular vision, and an ideal piece in their head that they were determined to realize. There’s no reason why this should be so: a painter competent enough to create a masterpiece in one style ought to have skills transferrable to another. But by mid-career, many of the titans of international art had settled into the sort of instantly recognizable compositional patterns that the less aesthetically inclined (or just the business-minded) might call a personal brand.

Most of the artists maintaining studio space on the second floor of 150 Bay Street are in mid-career, too.  A peek into their glass-walled studios reveals them to be catholic in their tastes, varied in their approaches, and commendably willing to charge down several roads at once. Yet their latest group show — one that rounds up eighteen of the best artists in the building — attempts to catch the measure of each exhibitor in the quickest strokes possible. “Signature,” curated by participating artists Deb Sinha, Cealliagh Pender, Susan Evans Grove, and Robert Cadena with assistance from Art Fair 14C director Robinson Holloway and deputy director Kristin DeAngelis, asks the 150 Gang to contribute a solitary piece that best exemplifies the artist’s work. The show, which will hang at ART150 Gallery through February 27, is a State of the Union address from 150 Bay and a crash course on a worthy crew. I’m surprised, nevertheless, that these protean figures have embraced the premise with such enthusiasm. Do they believe in the single signature piece, or the signature and proprietary style, that makes the complicated subject of their own artistry legible to viewers?  Or do they bring to “Signature” a sense of the irony that a project like this, mounted amidst the modern crack-up of authorial intention, entails?

As it turns out, it varies. Some of these artists make work that lends itself to expressions of individual identity; others, shyer types, are less inclined to insert themselves so vigorously in their canvases and sculptures. Celebrated painter Robert Policastro is, by now, so deeply identified with his images of charging, hook-toothed tigers that I’d expect his signature to be a paw-print. Josh Urso contributes some of his cracked, narrow, desk-lamp sized concrete towers that function so well as a metaphor for a fractured and fragile state of mind. Whenever I see Urso’s work, on the floor in the middle of a gallery floor, I’m always deathly afraid I’m going to knock it over, Jenga-style, which is, of course, part of the effect he’s trying to create. Susan Evans Grove takes impossibly gorgeous photographs of details of battered ship hulls, and “Changing Course” is characteristic of the entire haunting series of images, and does indeed exemplify a personal style that feels like an unbroken emotional transmission. Heloise scratches the outlines of a colorful, imperiled menagerie into a stark black background; “The Earth Cannot Wait” clears away superficial concerns and, as so many other recent works of Jersey City art have done, centers the painter’s ecological commitments. Meanwhile, Theda Sandiford parks another one of her “emotional baggage” shopping carts at the far end of the room, and tips her cap to contemporary hip-hop, as she often does, via its title: “Donda Donda Deluxe.” I’m just glad to know there’s somebody else out there who digs the new Kanye album, and not just his older, easier stuff.

Other artists seem more interested in subverting the concept of the signature style, or, perhaps, they just prefer to zig where you’d expect them to zag. Cheryl R. Riley does not provide an example of the hieroglyphic-like overpainting on torn book pages that she’s rightfully very well known for (a striking example hangs on her studio door, just around the corner from the entrance to ART150). Instead, we get a vintage typewriter from her series of household objects covered in plastic. It’s hard to tell whether Riley, who is one of the sharpest, most theorized artists in town, is making a comment on the writer’s manufacture of identity, or if she feels like this beautiful but inaccessible object represents her. The prolific Guillermo Bublik, who really deserves an extensive solo show, provides us with a lovely, subtle brown-and-yellow piece that resembles a map of an archipelago from above. It’s certainly Bublik-ish in its sense of balance and color, but it doesn’t much resemble his usual nested and brightly colored squiggles or his impressive wall-paintings. It’s even named after somebody else: Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga. Deb Sinha’s “City Lights BQE” feels less like a signature canvas and more like the apotheosis of the bleary, rainwashed images of nighttime streetscapes that he’s recently been making. (Sinha’s March 2022 show at the Majestic Condominiums with the like-minded Ben Fine ought to be exciting).

It's About Time by Jonte Drew

“It’s About Time” by Jonte Drew

On the far side of the Art150 Gallery is a parallel show from a young Paterson artist who is already busily refining a signature style of his own. Jonté Drew is the current Art Fair 14C MFA Artist in Residence, and at a glance, you can tell why the organizers of the Fair are enamored with him. His talent is evident, he foregrounds his personality and he’s got a sense of humor and play, and he makes the sociopolitical dimensions of his work evident. “Take A Breath,” which is curated and hung by Kristin DeAngelis along with Drew himself, is a lovely and thoroughly winning amble into innerspace, rendered in paint, pastels, and colored pencil. The person doing the escaping is either Drew himself or someone who looks like him. The character appears in most of these pieces; the bigger the work (and some are quite big), the more likely it is to contain Drew’s protagonist. And the avatar has an avatar, an externalization of the artist’s feelings of exile: a cute little black sheep who follows him around, and sometimes even gets a protective cuddle.

But what makes Jonté Drew a black sheep, anyway? For starters, he’s African American, and an urbanite, and as the three introductory pieces that greet visitors to ART150 make clear, he’s had to deal with the isolating and subtly marginalizing forces that his identity implies. The same character is transported to a green landscape dotted with trees and waterfalls; he’s bare-chested, his toes are in the grass, and his posture relaxes.  His du-rag, purple and pulled tight to his head in the bedroom painting, is festooned with flowers in the fantasy. In the show’s most remarkable image, he’s shown cross-legged and levitating, as far from the meanness of the mean streets as it’s possible to get, and fully himself. This lightness hints at the artist’s true offense to the society he inhabits: his conscientious objection to masculine imperatives. The protagonist of this story (and yes, it is a story) doesn’t want to be a bruiser or a brawler. He wants to rest in the bosom of of a soft and green world, and maybe nurture a few wayward lambs while he’s there.

The last four images of the exhibition put a needle-fine point on it. The human figures are gone, and the sheep is, too. We’re left with a quartet of flowers. These are rendered in the same colored-pencil pastels that Drew’s images of personal transcendence were. Even without the human figure depicted, the artist is present. He lets it all stand for him and his particular disposition: the softness of the pigment, the gentleness of the shading, the voluptuousness of the flower petals, the hard-won serenity, the quiet but firm rejection of standard male combativeness. The flowers are Jonté Drew, every bit as much as the man with the du-rag, and the Christ-like lost sheep is. The artist disappeared into his own work, until the signature, the irreducible mark of personality, is all you can see. He’s young, and he’s still budding, but he’s got the main idea and the skills to work a little magic. He would have fit in quite well in the neighboring show.

(Jonté Drew and Kristin DeAngelis will be at ART150 on the second floor 150 Bay Street from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Saturday, January 22. Though it’s not mandatory to register, here’s an EventBrite Link. The gallery will be open, and the shows on view, on Sundays from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. from the 23rd of January until the 27th of February.)