5.7: Sculptors Guild

Upon returning to Jersey City, the NYC-based 3D art organization goes big

Jersey City needs more exhibition space for large works. On this everyone agrees. There is only so much that can be smushed into SMUSH, or cast into the twin rooms at Deep Space, or snuck into the front room at Curious Matter. We want to encourage our artists to think big. Big thinking requires a capacious setting.  With no museum to call ours, we’re often forced to park large objects in outdoor spaces. It’s probably that the size and plenitude of the wall murals created by JCMAP is a reaction to our lack of giant galleries. Anybody who wants to work at great scale in this town is practically forced to take to the streets.

Why, then, did I respond to the smaller pieces at the 5.7 Sculptors Guild show more than I did to the big ones? Has my field of vision been miniaturized by life in Hudson County? On my behalf and yours, curator Tina Maneca has worked hard against our local imaginative limitations: she’s let the exhibition spill out from the galleries on the second floor of MoRA (80 Grand St.) and into to the park on the corner of Washington Street and the Firmament Gallery (329 Warren St.) at the Nimbus Arts Center. She’s taken the multi-venue approach to accommodate the heft of the work that the NYC-based Guild has brought to our side of the Hudson. It’s such a generous show and such a benign takeover of the southeastern corner of the Downtown that it almost seems churlish to be drawn to the modest-sized pieces tucked between the weighty visitations. 

The large works in the 5.7 Sculptors Guild show are uneven in quality, but they are splashy in a manner that we don’t usually see in Jersey City. They’re big kids jumping in puddles, making their impressions felt and advertising their weight. That’s even true of the one large sculpture made of truly light materials: Janet Goldner’s replica “Fire Escape,” made of yarn the grey-black of a pigeon on a tenement terrace. Maneca, naturally, has hung it in a window. There, redolent of alleyways, it catches the light through its loose weave. Though it doesn’t look steady enough for a human footfall, a mouse could take the three flights from the floor to the ceiling with ease. As industrial as Goldner’s piece is, it also presents the fire escape as a place of comfort. For apartment-dwellers who can’t afford a balcony, it’s an easy interface between the outdoors and the indoors. It’s made for hanging out, and the sculptor, shrewdly, presents it as an urban hammock.

Does it have to be as large as it is? I reckon so. A smaller version of a fire escape wouldn’t generate the same illusion, and wouldn’t make the same points about the combination of comfort and precarity that characterizes city living. We must almost believe that we can take that first step on to that first rung of the ladder and ascend to an apartment that exists in our memory, or, perhaps, in the collective imagination. The city is a big, brawny place, and sometimes demands giant gestures to get at its essence. Drawing a connection between tensile fiber and wrought iron is a reminder that both were fabricated in urban foundries. They’re two of the materials from which the metropolis was made. They behave differently, but they’re cousins.

Other pieces foreground substances that are immediately suggestive of the built environment in its enormity, and maybe even its permanence. Eric David Laxman parks a smoking skyscraper of his own in the greenspace on the corner of Washington and Grand: a seven foot tall “Standing Wave” statue with a tapered bronze base and a wagging lick of stainless steel on top. It looks like the world’s most elegant exhaust is emanating from an equally stylish plant. No clue is given about what might be getting manufactured in there, but whatever it is, it’s bound to be a long, tall, cool asset to its environment. 

The “7-Standing Wave” is a stone’s throw from the very symbol of business triumphant: a bull, head high and posture fixed, made of steel pounded and shined so fiercely that it looks like it’s drawing electricity from the ground. The body of Micajah Benvenue’s “El Toro” is sinuous, but it’s ultimately comprehensible. It’s nothing to tangle with, but it’s also not about to charge. It merely exudes confidence. This “Toro” is prettier and more reflective than the bull statues that stampede through the Financial District, but at fifteen dragon-like feet of length, it’s similarly irresistible. Pastured as it is within sight of Wall Street and the Battery — not to mention the banks and investment houses on our side of the Hudson River — it feels like a benign interpretation of the industry that keeps the metropolitan area going, just as “Standing Wave” feels like a celebration of the industries that put us on the map in the first place.

Yet there’s something about the enormity of both visions that feels a trifle impolite to a Jersey cynic. Urbane though they are, they are both flexes. Over at Nimbus, sculptor Elizabeth Knowles has been even bolder. She's festooned a tall concrete wall with painted wire and styrofoam and dubbed her mural-like piece a “Sunflower.” The yellow squiggles cohere into petals and a central eye; the red wires stretch from a central ring in all directions like mycelium, or a neural network. Knowles has made the inorganic surface bloom, and all cheery colors aside, she’s done it at a scale that’s more than a little bit scary. Back at MoRA, Elizabeth Miller McCue has guided a swarm of butterflies made of oxidized bronze mesh to a resting place on a wall. Each waffle-insect is large enough to have been cut out of a tennis racket. In “A Walk in the Garden,” she’s landed scores of them, and turned the light so that their size is amplified by their shadows. 

No metal hornets buzz from Damon Hamm’s formidable “Emerge,” an amalgam of rough steel half-rings in a shape that seems to mimic the organic textures and rhythms of a hive, but it’s possible that the beasts are buzzing in there, sitting on their stingers and plotting their next move. Meanwhile, Alberto Bursztyn disembowels a piano and splays its keys, rods and pads over the wall in a shape that mimics a bird taking flight. Like so many pieces in the 5.7 show, “Soar” is full of the longing of the earthbound to take flight: metal, stone, welded steel, lead, old machines and industrial detritus, all pushing skyward, each piece certain that if it can attain enough energy, enough scale, and enough charisma, it might achieve escape velocity.

Yet the real key to ascension is weightlessness. It is balance and cohesion that makes an object seem to levitate. The most aerodynamic works in the 5.7 show are modest-sized. These include Simon Rigg’s trio of bulbous but balanced marble shapes, bone-white, ridged, vessel-shaped but without any apertures, wrapped with handles and ribbed with lumps and tags. They’re called “Cloud,” and as alien as their contours are, they do appear to float in the middle of the Firmament. Right nearby, “Nocturne I,” a little puzzle-box by the tricky Michael Wolf hangs on a gallery wall. A claw-like object made of white gold adorns a clock-sized slab of black wood. Attached to the block at an angle is a metal dowel, and from that thin rod hangs a curtain of steel mesh. It looks like a shadow made solid — an occlusion that partially veils the piece and sets it dancing. 

Most defiant of gravity, however, are the smallest pieces in this entire sprawling exhibition: a pair of tiny statues by Frank Michielli, both done in blueblack steel polished so furiously it gleams like gemstones. “Mollusk I” conjures the oyster with a pair of tiny obelisks set face to face and raised off a platform on small stakes. They’re so close that the negative space between them is compacted and ground like a pearl, but kiss they do not. More intimate still is “Last Call,” an amalgamation of five U-shaped pieces of metal, several of which seem to hang on the air itself. The top curve of steel barely touches the rest of the sculpture: it’s at the edge of the diving board, toes hanging over into open space, ready to leap. The piece barely stands a foot tall. Surrounded by bossier voices, it’s easy to miss. But the congealing force that Michielli summons is a magic spell. Like many of us here in Jersey City, it’s small but mighty. Better still, it could fit in our apartments.

(Alas, the MORA segment of this show is about to close. The final day for 5.7 at 80 Grand is November 29th. The gallery will be open from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m.  Firmament Gallery won’t return the pieces to the Sculptors Guild until December 6th. Its closing party hours are 3 p.m. until 6 p.m., but you can always see the art whenever Nimbus is open. The five sculptures at the northeast corner park at Washington and Grand — technically Paulus Hook Park, but I’ve never heard anybody call it that — will be there through the winter, so there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get to see a stainless steel bull covered with snow. I’m looking forward to that.)