What is Eye Level?
Eye Level is a journal dedicated to covering and reviewing visual art exhibitions in Jersey City.
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A new review will be posted to the main page of the site every Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. There’ll also be shorter reviews and reflections posted here, so readers and gallery-goers and curious bystanders are encouraged to check in often. ​​​​
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Why limit yourself to Jersey City?
It’s no limitation, believe me. There are outstanding art spaces all over this town. During Fair and festival months, there are art shows in corner cafes. One of the most reliable places in town to see art is a wine shop. Art is everywhere, and a reporter covering it will never have a shortage of things to write about.
The fuller answer is that Jersey City is a visual arts town. It is very difficult to write about Jersey City without approaching visual art, and that is because visual art is the language we use to talk to ourselves about who we are — as a community, as creators, and as human beings.
Artists and gallerists take this responsibility seriously. Very little of the art made and exhibited here is a pure sales proposition. Many of the best shows mounted in Jersey City have no commercial dimensions at all. But they do have public dimensions. These are shows created by people who’ve got something to say, and who are determined to communicate something to us. Eye Level is dedicated to the radical proposition that we ought to listen.
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Who is the journal-keeper?
My name is Tris McCall, and I have lived, worked, and written in Hudson County for the past… well, whoo, let’s not think about that. Just say it’s been a dizzyingly long time. From 2020 to 2023, I covered visual art for the Jersey City Times, NJ Arts, and other publications, and I did it comprehensively. In 2024, I was less thorough than I’d like to have been, but I still managed to see and write about the major shows mounted in Jersey City.
In recognition of the work I’ve done and in anticipation of the writing I mean to do, the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Foundation saw fit to fund this project. Their generosity makes Eye Level possible.
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What about advertisements? Substack? Patreon?
There will never be ads, solicitations, paywalls, or subscriber-only pieces on Eye Level.
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In the past, you’ve written about music, architecture, politics, spirituality, and public culture. Will Eye Level get into any of that?
Eye Level is designed to be a visual art journal. But since music, architecture, politics, and even spirituality in Jersey City all seem to be presented to the Jersey City public with a visual arts element, I’m sure the rest of that stuff will sneak in here and there.
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Will you use artificial intelligence or LLM tools to enhance or compose these pieces?
No way. Everything on Eye Level is Tris McCall from the heart — sans machinery, sans chicanery.​​
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Haha, you’re going to tell us later that AI helped you write that last answer, right?
Get out of here.
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Since you live in Jersey City yourself, aren’t you a little close to this subject matter? Aren’t some of the people you’re writing about your friends? How can you be objective?
That’s a very good question. I’m not sure there’s anything I could write that would satisfy those with absolute faith in the blind taste test. As a veteran of Jersey Beat and other punk zines, I don’t agree with the premise: I think the best criticism comes from within the community under examination.
Before I was an acquaintance of any of these artists or gallerists, I was a viewer. It was the work itself that made me interested in knowing what they did, and as I’ve followed them over the years, their work continues to be the frame through which I understand them. I believe all good artists working in any medium and on any platform — painters, actors, pop stars, people playing guitar by themselves on a front porch — are like that. Their work mediates their relationship with the rest of the world. You, me, and everybody else in the audience is that world, and in that way, I am no different from any other viewer.
That arrangement suits me fine. I’m not looking to go to any galas. I don’t do this to win friends or advance an agenda, and I have no professional interest in the success of any of the people I’m writing about. All I guarantee: a legitimate human response to what I’m seeing and a fair appraisal of its virtues.
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What do you know about visual art, anyway?
Precious little. I never took an art class. I’ve never even been to Paris. Don’t ask me to draw anything; I haven’t got the talent. Most of what I know has been taught to me by readers — and by the artists and gallerists themselves, who’ve helped me to see better and broadened my field of vision with every show they’ve mounted.
I began writing about visual art because I wanted to understand what my neighbors were trying to tell me with such urgency, and in such vivid color, and with such passionate brushstrokes and pen-lines. I hope you’ll keep teaching me. I promise I will keep writing.
With love from Newark Avenue,
Tris McCall