Two stargazers examine the deep code of the universe (and the city) as it forms, coalesces, and falls apart around them.
Details of artists’ lives tell us less about their work than we think. Biography and psychology don’t aid our understanding nearly as much as a close examination of visual happenstance. But there’s something singular about a Greg Brickey show mounted in Jersey City. Certain critical rules need to be bent. To approach what Brickey does, it’s helpful to know that he has been in Jersey City for decades; not just that, he’s worked for the Cultural Affairs office under a succession of several different mayors. Before renovation closed the gallery, Brickey curated the art shows in the City Hall rotunda. He was, for years, involved in the planning and execution of the Studio Tour. No Icarus in Jersey City has flown closer to the dark sun of municipal government than Greg Brickey has.
The irony is that Brickey is no establishment man. He doesn’t wear a suit, and he does not behave as politicians do. Unlike other artists who’ve gone to work with elected leaders, he hasn’t traded a flinty creator’s personality for an anodyne one acceptable to the authorities. The art he makes is not designed to be ingratiating: there’s beauty in it, but he’s also laid snares across his canvases. Many of his messages for us are downright subversive. That he’s been able to survive and even occasionally thrive in a place from which most artists run in horror is a testament to his resourcefulness, his endurance, and his good fortune.
Since the closure of the Rotunda, Brickey has been exhibiting frequently in the local galleries, including shattering shows at IMUR Gallery (67 Greene St.) and Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.) in 2023 and 2024. In “Under the Thousand Stars” and “Proud Scenes of Dusty Hills and Family Homesteads,” his prior exhibitions, he threw constellations of jagged little paintings, some small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, all over the wide walls of Downtown art spaces, summoning a night sky that, for all its shine, pointedly refused to twinkle.
Less than a year later, Brickey is back, and he’s in good company. In “Chaos and Order” at the Fine Arts Gallery at the Mac Mahon Center at St. Peter’s University (47 Glenwood Ave.), his unnerving paintings face down equally starlit pieces by Katie Niewodowski, a Jersey City artist with a mystical streak and a hopeful eye on the heavens. It’s a clever pairing from curator Beatrice Mady: Brickey’s fiery cityscapes and bomb-like shooting stars on the west wall and Niewodowski’s colorful celebrations of the microscopic, telescopic, and the purely symbolic on the east.
It is a little too easy, however, to call Niewodowski’s paintings the representatives of order and dub Brickey the agent of chaos. Proximity to Niewodowski’s pieces brings out the youthful provocation and sense of adventure in Brickey’s fields of zigzags and triangles, and exposure to Brickey’s vision has augmented the fissile energy in Niewodowski’s depictions of deep outer and innerspace.
Well, maybe just a little. For the most part, Niewodowski dwells within a cooperative cosmos. That’s not to say it’s uninteresting or inactive: the mandalas, rays, and stardust in her paintings seem to have burst from the most benign Big Bang imaginable. Niewodowski gives us velocity without disharmony, geometry without rigid determinism, matter without antimatter.
“Torus,” a great, sumptuous purple circle of a painting that the artist showed at “The Sacred and Sublime,” her 2023 exhibition at the Carr Hall Gallery at St. Paul and Incarnation (38 Duncan Ave.), feels like a map of a friendlier galaxy than the one we know. Spheres subdivided into six segments cluster around a central star that shoots forth beams of particle-rich, white dotted matter (Niewodowski assures us that the acrylic paint glows in the dark; I believe her). The rays reach out to embrace the viewer. Is this the beginning of time, or the streaming of a new idea from the pineal gland of an enlightened creator? Or is that the same thing?
It’s probably the same thing. Each creator, after all, gives order to a turbulent private world. Some physicists still believe that the universe is shaped like a torus; perhaps they’re right, and perhaps that helps explain why round objects always feel homey and pleasing to us. Dots and circles in Niewodowski’s work sometimes feel like suns, planets, and stars, sometimes like bubbles in a chemical substrate where life is coming into being, and sometimes like… well, like circles: old-fashioned symbols of eternity, impermeability, and completeness.
In a small, modest, but remarkable piece near the entrance to the show, a ring passes over a dark orb. Behind the black sphere, a sun-like crescent rises; all around the two shapes, other star-like circles have their radiant say. This is the inverse of an eclipse. In this brilliant firmament, every celestial body shines, and no planet or star or little world must wait in the penumbra of any other.
That generosity of spirit reoccurs in the “Tectonics” pieces: amalgamations of paper and foam divided into hundreds of little colored hexagons, curved at the edges like eggshells and held to the wall by magnetic force. Because of the artist’s color choices, parts of this beehive seem to shine with inner illumination, but no one hex is given prominence over any other. This is a spiritual vision rather than an astronomical or geological one. It’s the universe re-coded according to the artist’s priorities — her imposition of mystic order on the sprawling darkness and the mute, rumbling earth.
To Katie Niewodowski, a star is a body of light that reaches out to touch us. Those pointed rays tell us that it wants to know us. When we look at her pieces, we can almost feel the friendly photons. That’s not what Greg Brickey sees when he looks at the night sky. To him, a star is a distant and cold thing, solid and unchangeable, with its blades out like a shuriken. When a star shoots at us, it does so like a projectile — a cannonball fired from deep space.
In “Blood Meridian,” stars are shooting all over the place, at dangerous angles, streaking toward the bottom of the painting. Chemical symbols, poppies, and a salivating snake head on a red and black striped background all hint at addiction, compulsion, and a cage too sturdy to escape. It’s a reminder that stars aren’t just things that lovers wish on. They’re also what you see when you hit your head.
When these deadly messengers from the sky meet the ground, what happens? Nothing orderly. In “Citadel,” Brickey gives us a town as piercing as the point of a star, hundreds of stars, and an earth as sharp as a sawblade. The buildings in Brickey’s city — which we must assume is our city — balance uneasily on these pinnacles, some remaining steady, and some, straight off their moorings, slump dangerously toward us. A few are overturned. Amidst this riot of bright color and dangerous angles, only the steeples of the churches and the spires of the skyscrapers are upright and unaffected. Are they immune? Is Brickey suggesting a secret allegiance between institutions and the forces overturning the landscape for everybody else?
“Ghost Town #6” doesn’t provide a solution to the riddle, but it does deliver some hard hints. Brickey has literalized the title by making the buildings themselves into specters, complete with Casper-like tapering tails. Decked out in battleship gray, they streak away from a wild and uneven landscape — but they’re still tethered to it. The bombardment is back, too: a swarm of five-pointed terrors, star insignias in red and black teardrops that look as if they’ve been ripped from the fuselage of a WWII fighter. Just as he does in “Citadel,” he leaves the viewer nowhere to hide. This canvas is covered from corner to corner with brilliant trouble.
It's a reminder that while Brickey has sometimes been called upon to speak for the city, he’s never lied about it. From his seat at the heels of power, he’s seen peril: a place where frenetic activity is often confused with progress, stimulation is constant, and living is tough for those who can’t ride the peaked waves. After decades of service, this is the judgment he’s got for us. This, to Brickey, is what we look like. I’m afraid we have to take him very seriously. If anybody ought to, he ought to know.
(The Mac Mahon Student Center is, in theory, open all day, but it can be a little tricky getting in. It is an active college campus, after all, and the buildings are for those who have enrolled in classes. Go to the front of the building — the side facing the campus — and tell the security guard you're interested in seeing the art show. It's on the fifth floor, and it's free.)
