??It?s snowing on us all/and on a three-story fix-up off of Van Vorst Park/a young lawyer couple from Manhattan bought/where for no special reason in the back of a closet/a thick, dusty volume from the Thirties sits open/with a broken spine and smelling of mildew/to a chapter titled Social Realism.?
When Curious Matter gallery director Raymond Mingst first showed ?Snow in New Jersey? by Jersey City poet August Kleinzahler to Brendan Carroll, a local curator most recently known for his shows at Hamilton Square and the Majestic Theater Condominiums, Carroll says ?it knocked (him) out.?
?I could see this place he describes in the poem,? says Carroll. ?I could identify with his use of language. The words have weight and depth. They?re concrete. Heavy. Hit like a ball-peen hammer. At the same time, the poem has a sense of light and space.?
Inspired by ?Snow in North Jersey,? which you can read in full length here, Carroll brought together eight artists for a show of the same name at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange.
?These artists vary in approach, style, and conceptual framework. That being said, they are unified by a blue collar no-frills attitude to making art? I believe this attitude is reflected in the tone of Kleinzahler?s poem. At first glance, the pairing of artwork may seem obscure, even jarring, (but) ?Snow In North Jersey? is chock full of this type of collisions,? says Carroll.
Participants include JC artists Anne Percoco, Jason Seder and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky as well as artists Koji Shimizu, Lisa Dahl, Ryan Higgins and So Yoon Lym from the region and one of Hoboken?s best-known painters, Tim Daly. All eight, Carroll says, had work that somehow reminded him of Kleinzahler?s poem, or at the very least, the New Jersey that Kleinzahler describes.
?Picasso had Marie-Th?r?se Walter as a muse. Kleinzahler, like many of the artists in the show, has New Jersey. The state is not as glamorous as Walter, but it certainly captures the imagination. Some artists rely on beauty while others rely on the ugly and the absurd. That being said, not all the work in the show is unglamorous,? says the curator, who gave examples. ?Koji Shimizu?s suite of paintings are as sweet as cotton candy, and just as delightful. Tim Daly?s painting of a stone reservoir covered in snow during twilight has as much juice as landscapes by Martin Johnson Heade, George Bellows or George Inness.?
Kleinzahler?s exploration of the collision between the natural world and industrialization is also seen, Carroll says, in some of the artists? work. ?This forceful coming together of disparate entities is jarring,? he says, adding that Ryan Higgins?s sculpture Light Snack and Journal Square resident Jason Seder?s drawings, which the curator first spotted as a facsimile on Instagram, have a similar impact or feel.
Percoco (whose work ?Field Studies? is seen above), greatly focuses on this theme. The 30-year-old, who lives near Journal Square and the Heights, says the work is a series of collages composed of thousands of images of trees that she cut out of phone book ads.
?These tree images range from the simplest geometric abstractions to detailed color photos,? she says. ?By amassing these diverse representations of nature into a varied but coherent landscape, I created what could be called subliminal forests of New Jersey.?
The artist, who has other works in the show as well, says she felt a connection with ?Snow in North Jersey,? much like Carroll did. ?It?s just awesome to read such a great poem about the place where I live,? she says. ?I recognize landmarks, like the stone bears in the park. It?s great to know that the landscape that inspires me has inspired other artists and writers long before me. It makes me feel like I?m part of a larger conversation.?
Kleinzahler, who was born in Jersey City in 1949 and was raised in Fort Lee, must?ve known an older Jersey, says Skvirsky, who is showing a series of photographers from her series on the Holland Tunnel as well as a two-channel video called ?The Conversation.? Both of the works, she says, investigate the act of photographing in a post-9/11 world, where areas under intense surveillance also serve as backdrops to the everyday lives of thousands.
?The Holland Tunnel Neighborhood is completely different than how August must have experienced JC as a child,? says the 43-year-old. ?Yet in this no man?s land between Hoboken and Hamilton Park and at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel there is an ?old school? seedy quality that I imagine is perhaps reminiscent of the Old JC than the current gentrifying JC.?
An opening reception for ?Snow in North Jersey,? will be held tonight, Jan. 17, at 7 pm at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange. The show runs through Feb. 23.
Check out more photos from the exhibit:
JC artists? photos courtesy of the artists; others courtesy of Pierro Gallery
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