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Art Review: “The Air and the Space”

September 22, 2020/in Diversions, Eye Level, header, Visual Arts /by Tris McCall

Winifred McNeill is an absolute local. She lives in Jersey City, teaches at NJCU, and she’s exhibited at Drawing Rooms, Victory Hall, and in the Windows on Columbus. Much of her prior work falls firmly within the Jersey post-industrial style: She’s fashioned plumbing pipes into tiny viewing chambers for her nude sketches, for instance, and she’s drawn to the smudged, illegible, overwritten quality of discarded books. Like many of the marsh creatures who populate these Garden State swamps, she’s fascinated by birds and seashells. Her color palette runs toward ghostly off-whites, factory-soot greys, and chemical blues. This is a Jersey person, in other words.

Yet her new exhibition stretches across the ocean. “The Air and the Space,” a short-run show that wraps up at the Art House Productions Gallery this weekend, plays gently but trenchantly with European signifiers and centuries-old traditions. McNeill, balanced as always, does this without giving up any of the characteristic qualities that root her in the arts movements of Hudson County. The pieces in “The Air and the Space” were created during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands, and that influence shows. A series of rectangular, tile-like sculptures, iced like pound cakes with Limoges porcelain, bear their images in Delft blue. Figures in an array of charcoal drawings have a tragic, mythological quality to them. The show is dominated by a series of small ceramic busts, mostly of bald-headed men, some colored gold, some slightly stained, all beautifully expressive, all evincing assumed nobility. They look as if they could have been unearthed from Pompeii.

McNeill and the Art House place these small busts — most of which could fit easily in the palm of a hand — on tall, taper-candle-thin pedestals, and arrange them in clusters at the center of the gallery. The result feels like a forum, and it renders the viewer a spectator and an eavesdropper, and maybe even an interloper, too.  If some of McNeill’s characters seem more interested in projecting stoicism and a defiant upturned chin than they are in conversing with their fellows, well, that may strike you as an honest assessment of transhistorical political discourse. It is, perhaps, for the best that Art House is limiting access to the show to a few viewers at a time because an errant swipe of an autumn coat could send all of these busts and their pedestals crashing to the ground like Jenga sticks. A slightly larger sculpture in the window looks as if it has something to say — but it is missing most of its face, and its head is hollow. Do these proud little patricians know how fragile they are? Do any of us?

The Ceramic Work Center residency ended just as the pandemic was gathering strength, (McNeill, the Art House tells me, was on one of the last planes back to the United States), and the shadow of the global health crisis does hang over “The Air and the Space.” But this small but eloquent exhibition speaks of older anxieties, too: impermanence, transience, the difficulties of communication, the prevalence and folly of hero worship, and the curious silence in the public square. These are, alas, threats that cannot be vaccinated against.

 

The Air and the Space

Through September 27

The Art House Gallery

262 17th Street, Jersey City

Only eight visitors are allowed in the gallery at once. Masks are required. Email gallery@arthouseroductions.org to schedule a visit.

www.arthouseproductions.org

 

 

 

News Briefs

Hudson County Community College has been named the recipient of a one-year, $850,000 investment from the JPMorgan Chase. The investment will be utilized for a program the College developed to address the challenges of the economic crisis in Hudson County that were brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program is designed to provide lasting improvement in the County’s workforce ecosystem.

Mayor Steven Fulop and the Jersey City Economic Development Corporation (JCEDC) have launched the latest round of emergency funding to provide over $2.5 million in direct aid and support to Jersey City’s neediest residents, regardless of immigration status. The city will partner with  York Street, Women Rising, United Way, and Puertorriqueños Asociados for Community Organization (PACO). 

Darius Evans, age 45, of Jersey City was arrested  on Monday by The Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in connection with the stabbing death of 39-year-old Tyrone Haskins early New Year’s morning. The charges include Murder and two counts of Possession of a Weapon for Unlawful Purposes.

Mayor Steven Fulop is joining forces with Uber to announce a new agreement that will expand residents’ access to COVID-19 vaccinations with free Uber rides to and from Jersey City vaccination sites. Phase 1B includes essential frontline workers and seniors 75 years old and over.

According to a report in the Jersey Journal, Jersey City received its first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines Monday and plans to begin vaccinating eligible residents later this week at the Mary McLeod Bethune Center.

The federal Paycheck Protection Program, which offers businesses loans that can be forgivable, reopened on January 11th. The revised program focuses first on underserved borrowers – minority- and women-owned businesses.

Jersey Art Exchange (JAX) has merged with Art House Productions effective January 2021 to help improve and expand arts education and opportunities for the Jersey City community. JAX Founder Jacqueline Arias will remain Director of the program at Art House.

Christmas trees will be collected citywide every Wednesday night throughout the month of January. Pickup resumes this Wednesday January 13th.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upcoming Events

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