If you’re old enough, and you’ve been in Jersey City long enough, you know: the Downtown skies used to look different. The closer a visitor got to the waterfront, the more likely it was that the block was entirely dark. Illumination was an angled, furtive, and indirect thing. It came from the big light across the river, the towers of Newport, and, on exceptionally clear nights, the moon and the stars.
These days, those skies are brighter, but they’re also trickier to see. There are big buildings where vacant lots used to be. There’s a double sky over the warehouse district — the blue firmament where birds and airplanes fly, and its distorted reflection in the tall columns of plate glass. In the photographs of Mindy Gluck, it’s not always easy to tell where the towers end and the open air begins. The clouds over Downtown Jersey City impart their color, and their turbulence, to the structures that crowd our view of the heavens.
In “Present Tense and Other Illusions,” which’ll hang in the lobby at ART150 (150 Bay St.) through the end of the month, Gluck is a merciless tour guide, relentlessly defamiliarizing the Jersey City skyline, making the Warehouse District look like a stardock on a strange and not too friendly planet. The photographer is acutely sensitive to the rhythms of Downtown architecture, which, she finds, are as regular, as swaggering, and as unbroken as the song of a jackhammer. Of the many photographers who’ve chronicled the transformation that has taken place in our city over the past two decades, Gluck is the most destabilizing — and maybe the most scathing, too.
She upends the viewer’s orientation by flipping and warping the images, playing with hues and shadows, and cropping the shots so the walls of girders and glass seem to go on forever. To amplify the sleek, impersonal feel of the architecture she’s shooting, she’ll sometimes print directly on to aluminum plates. Her “DOWNtown GEOmetrics” series of photographs make waterfront towers look like the bellies of imperial star cruisers in sci-fi movies: macho, imposing, metallic and dramatic, vacuum-sealed against the outside world and its unruly incursions.
Is this what we’ve become? Have we traded the grubby, street-level familiarity of the old Downtown for something as cold as space? Have we gone from Rebel Alliance to Death Star? Number 6 in her “DOWNtown JC” series presents a waterfront tower as something akin to a giant, icy reflector, with mirror-like windows as seamless as the scales on an armadillo. The building seems to be absorbing the sky, drawing in the clouds, transmuting them, creating an alternate ceiling, changing the viewer’s orientation to the roof of the world. In other shots from the same series, the sky is hinted at, or filtered through thick, distorting glass. It can be quite beautiful. It is almost always alien.
When we catch a glimpse of the interiors of these buildings, what we see is hardly welcoming. In an astonishing shot of a sleek glass tower that chokes an entire frame, a lime of office lights slash through a high floor. The long fluorescent bulbs look like a hail of lasers against a charmless drop ceiling. There’s no trace of human habitation. Gluck’s photos in “Present Tense” gets at one of the great ironies of this period of hyperdevelopment: though we’ve built at every available address, the new waterfront feels just as deserted as the old vacant lots did. We don’t even have the cozy blanket of night to pull over ourselves anymore.
A block west from 150 Bay Street, stargazers have another option. In “Proud Scenes of Dusty Hills and Family Homesteads,” which will hang at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.) until March 31, Greg Brickey simulates a bright night sky with hundreds of fragmentary paintings, some cut in tiny triangular or quadrilateral shapes, some long and dagger-like, stuck on the Gallery’s wide street-facing wall. This is a bigger and bolder constellation than the one Brickey assembled at IMUR (67 Greene St.) in late 2023, but if you saw that excellent show, you already know the overwhelming effect of standing in front of the artist’s storm of pike-sharp shards.
There are other obsessive pieces in “Proud Scenes,” including a wallful of drawings of one hundred and forty ink-smeared faces, arranged in a grid of surprised and impassive expressions, streaks of black stain, star-stamps, flowers, geometric rings. But the heart of the show is the installation of painting chips — a work that looks as if a larger painting has shattered like windshield glass. Motifs leap across the fragments: saw-toothed triangles, wings, steps, hypodermic needles, bell-like blooms. Brickey’s stars often look like the insignia on the fuselage of a military aircraft. They’re often shooting, heading down diagonally across the shards, trailing stardust and frozen in mid-plummet.
This is, in other words, no peaceful night sky. Brickey’s starry expanse is busy and agitated: it’s a sight of wonder, but also a place of danger. These aren’t stars to wish on — they might be the sort of stars you’d see if you hit your head, or if astigmatism compromised your vision. The Brickey heavens are spectacular, but they’re also unattainable, estranged from the viewer by distance and attitude. Looking up, it turns out, is both more complicated and more difficult than it seems like it’d be.
(The Art House Productions gallery is open on the weekends from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The Lobby at 150 Bay Street, which is located on the corner of First and Provost, is open during the weekends, too.)