For Women’s History Month, our most subversive gallery rounds up some old friends for a sly, subtly provocative group show.
Deep Space (77 Cornelison Ave.) has a feature unusual for local galleries. It’s a window. It isn’t one of those big plate glass panels that overlooks the sidewalk, or a skylight, or anything fancy at all. Instead, it’s the sort of fenestration you might find in the kitchen of a typical Jersey City apartment — a side-of-the-building kind of window, with a side-of-the-building kind of view. In a gallery with a taste for science fiction, parallel worlds, and mystical flights, the window is a touch of the terrestrial. No matter how far out in Deep Space an exhibition goes, the window provides natural light and a glimpse of an earthly landscape.
The artists that make Deep Space their clubhouse probably aren’t thinking about the gallery walls when they paint and sculpt. Then again, they’re a pretty tight crew, and they’re sensitive to the contours of place and time. Deep Space might creep into their dreams. And if Deep Space is part of their eyelid movies, it’s a pretty safe bet that that window is present in a scene or two.
That which haunts the unconscious eventually shows up on the canvas. “N Is for Nancy,” this year’s version of the annual Deep Space all-female group show mounted for Women’s History Month, is accidentally (?) replete with windows metaphorical and actual. Many of them are depicted in the works on display, frames within frames, subtly changing the tenor and attitude of these paintings. Others are implied by angled sunlight or wrinkles and distortions in the picture meant to slightly warp the viewer’s perspective. We see windows from the street, and windows from the insides of bedrooms and living rooms. Then there are the imaginary windows through which we peek into other people’s spaces. They mediate our views of these scenes of domestic life and blur the distinction between interiors and exteriors, inner states and the outer realm beyond the walls.
All of this is salient to the experience of women. The indoor realm is, stereotypically, theirs; the window is the promise of the escape from the doll’s house. The incisive Amelia Shields, whose work always says much more than it initially seems like it does, sends this up with a bit of visual satire: a trio of acrylic and paint marker canvases based on the descriptions of Martha Stewart Living episodes. In “Martha Sliving S1 E3,” an indoor scene, Shields serves us a tomato sandwich on a hero roll, plated on a checkerboard wrapper, right beneath a savage-looking plant. From the house — Martha’s domain — we can see a gardener crouched over a vegetable patch. Framed in the window, he labors over a cramped planter in a fenced yard. The outside world looks as circumscribed and contained as a drawing room.
For those who are on the wild side of the window, the interior of the house is opaque. Francesca Reyes, creator of startling little urban scenes on glazed ceramics scarcely bigger than seashells, fits twenty-three windows into “Shades of Emerald.” Not one of them betrays a thing about the rooms inside the tenements, or the interiors of the cars parked near the apartment buildings. Instead they’re black, or solid white, or a swirl of sky blue. The decision to seal these windows imparts a fortresslike feel to Reyes’s streetscape. Inhabitants can look out, but passersby can’t see in.
If they did, what would they find? Queenly turbulence? Women neglecting their domestic duties? Or maybe just an un-ladylike mess? The bedroom windows in Ekaterina Popova’s cozily defiant “Slow Start” are choked by trees. They’re a spring green screen, a ward to chase away snoops, and a shield behind which the absent occupant can tidy up at her own pace. The leaves are also a striking contrast with the pink bedspread and the red-tinted lampshade and armoire. Everything is pleasantly rumpled and lived in; and Popova amplifies the feelings of lazy comfort and chaos with thick, unruly brushstrokes, squiggles and smears, and oil paint stuffed in the corners of the picture like balled-up socks jammed into the cracks between the air conditioner and the window frame.
As secluded as “Slow Start” feels, light does penetrate the bedroom, tinting the surface of the bedspread, warming up the air, making the cosmetic bottles atop the armoire glow. The bedroom in Jade Reinhardt’s dramatic, meticulously rendered oil painting and collage “Ophelia” is illuminated, too — but we’re not shown the window, or any break in the walls of black and green stripes that look suspiciously like bars. Popova’s bed is empty except for a pet dog; Reinhardt shows us the girl in the room, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, red hair streaming around her drawn and ghostly face, conspicuously uninterested in escape. That bottled-up feeling extends to sea creatures of indeterminate provenance in a quintet of fishbowls. A bra lies on a tiled floor, a butterfly perches on the headboard, and a snake curls around one of its slats. The woman’s forehead is anointed by the falling petals of a dried flower. She looks like she’s about to receive something that she may not exactly want to get.
Perhaps she’s already gotten it. Reinhardt has embedded an actual love letter into this piece. It’s open on the bed and marked with a lipstick kiss, but the subject of the painting shows it no interest. Instead, she holds a flame-like lock of her hair in one hand and a pair of entwined poppies in another. This could be part of her reply — or maybe these mementos are for her eyes alone.
Still we pry. That’s part of the thrillingly invasive power of painting, especially paintings of, and by, women: through them, we enter sealed interiors and personal spaces. There, we learn secrets, and get intimations of private sensuality. We’re shown the blooms budding in the hothouses. There are flowers all over “Ophelia;” Shields presents us with a single rose, a phallic piping bag, and a suggestively cracked and stretched fortune cookie in a piece that teases us with the sexual energy that always underpinned Martha Stewart’s version of domesticity. Sarah Fairchild shocks us with a trio of ridiculously pink peonies made from foil, fuzz, and glitter, like a velvet painting too cool to need assistance from the blacklight. The petals are surrounded by leaves like grasping hands, and each sensuous blossom is attended to by a single probing butterfly.
The symbiotic relationship between women and plants — some potted, some stretching toward the light, and some liberated in the jungle — is general throughout “N Is for Nancy.” In painter Sarah J. Mueller’s “Waiting,” a fern breaks over the body of a barefoot and red-nailed young woman like a wave. “Electric Current,” a luminous piece in lime wash, acrylic, and watercolor by the druidic Rebecca N. Johnson, a haloed and sanctified girl practically dissolves into the dense verdure that surrounds her. Through clay and gold luster glaze, ceramicist Shamona Stokes gives us a total conflation between the female and the vegetal. In her creepy-hilarious “Muckflower,” a beatific face blooms from a stalk that has shot upward from a mossy stump. She’s a spirit of the woods, but she’s also awfully familiar.
All of this play and experimentation comes to a thrilling head in the painting that “N Is for Nancy” is going to be remembered for. Painter Cortney Herron shows us a strange creature: it has the body of a cat, but with the shrouded eyes and the tiny, bud-like lips of a girl. This poised and disaffected — but oddly magnetic — beast sits pretty atop a table on a red tuffet, and squashes the stems of a trio of drooping white tulips. Behind her are mute rectangles that look like they might be windows, but they’re really spaces in the slats of high-backed chairs. Through them, we see nothing but wall. Herron calls the piece “Do What I Want.” Surely this impertinent catwoman feels that way. But in order for her to live it, she’s going to have to figure out a way to get outside.
(Deep Space Gallery is always open by appointment, often open on the weekends, and regularly hopping during its many special events. You're encouraged to check their website to find out about what's next, because there's always something next. If you've never been there, have you even gone to Jersey City? That'd be like a Hobokenite skipping Maxwell's in the '80s.)
