At the ART150 Gallery, the human figure continues its long and tortured comeback from its lockdown-era eclipse.
The pandemic did not stop Jersey City artists from making art. Yet art, like everything else, didn’t come through the lockdown period unscathed. The human figure, for instance. dropped out of area exhibitions entirely, as painters, curators, and gallerists turned to abstract pieces, non-figurative art, and empty streetscapes. “Coming Into Focus,” an excellent winter 2022 show at the Majestic Theater Condominiums, caught the spirit of the moment: empty corners and sidewalks, long, silent, bleary evenings, the city seen from behind a window, tantalizingly close but untouchable. Deb Sinha was one of the two artists in that show, and his scenes of an electrified but empty New York City braced against invisible forces seemed to capture the feel of the coming of the bug — even though many of them were painted before the bug even existed.
So Sinha’s turn toward traditional portraiture has felt like a significant event in our psychic recovery from a crisis that knocked us flat. “Body of Work,” a group show in the ART150 Gallery (150 Bay St.) — which is sometimes called the ProArts Gallery — contains two of Sinha’s practically-nudes. The young man depicted in “A Hug” is healthy, muscular, and a little pouty, and the impertinent twist of his bare torso and stretch of his stomach is downright sexy. Yet his arms are wrapped around himself. He looks ready to engage, but he’s also wary of what’s coming at him. Bright as his eyes are, they do not look cheerful. Sinha, who has proven that he’s very good at capturing personality and ambiguity, is true to this moment. The body is back, inside and outside of the gallery. But it’s not quite the same as it was.
“Body of Work,” which features human figures both realized and implied from twenty-one artists affiliated with the projects and studios at 150 Bay St., was co-curated by Alexandra Álvarez and Frank Ippolito: pointed choices for an ambivalent time. Ippolito generates images of human beings in transition, including migrants, castaways, and weird-ass performers, and he puts them in motion in lenticular prints that morph before the viewer’s eyes as she walks by. The people he’s framed in his backlit photographs seem conscious of their confinement. “Punctuation Mark” is a shot of a dancer who appears to be dissolving into steam, but the heel of her hand and her forearm, pressed against the frosted glass, ground the subject in the terrestrial world and the photograph in the present moment.
Álvarez, the showrunner at Guaicora Studios, usually favors Caribbean-cheerful colors and tight, radiant white lines and dashes ringing her human figures. “Dreaming the Life,” her contribution to “Body of Work,” has neither. Instead, it’s a tall multimedia piece in rainy-morning grays, populated by six figures whose faces are either partially occluded or half removed from the frame. Their bodies are dotted with white paint that looks like scuff marks, and they’re segmented at the joints with strings of x-marks that look more than a bit like sutures.
This piece is not atypical for the show. Evidence of damage, and imperfect healing, is all over “Body of Work,” and many of the faces of the human beings represented in the exhibition have been deliberately obscured. Even when these pieces are unhappy, the tone is frequently whimsical and sometimes sardonic. Sherly Fan, a young artist in the Project 14C residences next door, one-ups Ippolito with a clever glow-box of her own: a thick frame of foam clouds around an image of a frame of clouds around a slump-shouldered individual with a cloud where her head should be. Roberto Colangeli’s “Ethereal Embrace,” a cosmic drama in oil paint unfolding in midair between two spectral creatures, feels as much like a struggle as it does an ascension to heaven. Because we can’t see the face of the celestial being, it’s hard to tell if the body in its arms is being escorted to paradise or getting bounced from the kingdom.
Paul Wirhun, who uses shattered and painted eggshells like mosaic pieces, gives us a fractured silhouette of the Statue of Liberty in black against a spring-floral backdrop. We’re assured that this is “Liberty in Ecstasy,” but it looks more like the shadow of a monster. Sculptor Maude Lemaire of Modsaica brings that same jigsaw-puzzle jones to reassemble broken fragments to “Space Disco Valentina,” a curious mannequin made of thousands of pearly glass triangles. Fans of Robyn Hitchcock will be interested to know that Lemaire’s Valentina is fitted with a lightbulb head. She’s vigilant, though, watchful and strategically decentralized: wide open eyes stare out at us from her arms, her stomach, and just below her breasts. (150 artist Robert Policastro informs us that Lemaire is leaving the building; if so, she’ll be missed.)
The sharp-cornered pieces of “Valentina” find echoes in the far corner of the gallery. There, “Adamu,” by the underexposed Wachira, hones those jagged points. His subject is assembled from acrylic-painted strips, each tinted, joined and angled in such a way that his body takes on the lustrous quality of a dark quartz crystal. Wachira even accentuates the edges of the tunic tied around the top of his arm like a tourniquet. We can’t see his entire face — his eyes are cut out of the frame — but his set jaw and his protruding lower lip suggest that he isn’t having much fun. Like many of the representations of people in “Body of Work,” “Adamu” is both beautiful and uncomfortable; it presents a person as something busted up, holding together, strong, even, but without the seamless unity we’re accustomed to seeing in classical art. “Adamu” isn’t going down. He may be a bear to tangle with. But the cracks are showing.
In this context, even the clothing in the show seems possessed by a brittle, savage energy. Tyler Neasloney’s pop star outfit, jagged enough for Bowie but probably best suited for a lightning-strike rapper like Doechii, seems to show off its own deft scissorwork with electric zigzags of blue and green fabric. This is dress that looks like it might cut the unwary, or even lacerate its wearer. Then there’s the Palestinian artist Samar Hussaini, who initially contributed the showstopper “Narrative of Belonging” to the “War Peace” group exhibit that occupied the 14C Gallery just next door. In her dresses, she juxtaposes patterns drawn from Middle Eastern textile traditions with concentric rectangles that look uncomfortably like bomber targets. Her clothing alludes to bodies that are intact, but could be blown apart at any moment.
Yet it’s still a triumph of resilience that artists and curators are returning to the human figure in the midst of a decade that has cost us so many humans. Policastro, who usually paints tigers, presents a slightly less charismatic form of megafauna: us. His “Male” and “Woman” nude pastels on newsprint paper are sturdy-looking customers; we can’t see their faces, either, but their muscular bodies, shown from behind, suggest strongly that they’re tigers, too. Photographer Dorie Dahlberg, a visual storyteller and poet, was, like Sinha, an accidental chronicler of the terrible stillness of the lockdown period at its height. In “Body of Work,” she wrongfoots us all with a tough, winsome pair of black line drawings of people, presented without geographical or cultural context. She’s traded places with Lucy Rovetto, a mercurial multi-media artist who doesn’t usually show us photographs. Here, she has: a pair of intimate, strangely emotional close-ups of parts of a woman’s body with an emphasis on the texture of skin.
“Body of Work” even provides us a rare treat (at least for us in Jersey City) : a figurative work by Elinor Dei Tos Pironti, best known for her paintings of overlapping vertical and horizontal lines in complementary colors. “Generations,” a drawing in colored pencil, pairs two sitters in front of a mound of flowers and leaves. They’re faceless, and limbless, and it’s impossible to know where one ends and the other begins. But they’re recognizably human, and most definitely familiar, and from their postures, it seems like their relationship is complex. In lieu of detail, Dei Tos Pironti has scribbled thin black and red lines over the two. Each time it seems like an expression is coalescing, we’re reminding that it’s merely the manner in which these characters have been distressed. Our marks of trauma, it seems, have been folded into our personalities. That would be a very sad thing to see if we’d had a choice. We now know: it’s simply what survivors do.
(The ART150 Gallery is open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. Because the 150 Bay Street warren is getting more complicated to navigate all the time, it can be a bit tricky to find. Go to the corner of First St. and Provost St. and take the elevator to the second floor. While you’re there, check out Rene Saheb’s show in the ground floor gallery. Rene is also a contributor to “Body of Work.”)
