The prolific and provocative illustrator and graphic artist entertains and enlightens us with characters who've left gender far behind.
“God is non-binary” reads the sign outside St. John’s Lutheran on North Street. That might sound Jersey City cheeky, but it’s consistent with church catechism. Christians teach that God is a being of pure spirit, and that means that any gender characteristics we ascribe to Him (including the convention of calling him Him) are human vanity. God has no private parts. If it’s true that He created us in His image, perhaps that means that we, too, are impossible to classify or define.
Just like the Lutherans of North Street, Hans Kasper Ivan Karp dreams of a world where gender nonconformity is no obstacle to fulfillment. Karp has a significant advantage that they don’t, though: he’s imaginary. He’s a scientist in a book of speculative fiction, and that means his experimentation is likely to bring about radical outcomes that we earthbound and embodied characters can only imagine for ourselves. Cheryl Gross, a prolific and opinionated Jersey City artist, set Karp at the problem in The Z Factor, her 2014 novel. Karp mints a new chromosome, thereby throwing the alphabet soup of gender expression into three-lettered chaos.
Thus were born the Umons: fantasy beings apart from us but still recognizably human. On her trip past the Phantom Tollbooth, Gross acted as her own Jules Feiffer, decorating the pages of her book with Umon illustrations both satirical and compassionate. Some of those initial pictures are viewable in a vitrine at “The Z Factor,” a timely and imaginative twenty-two piece show that will hang in the first gallery a visitor sees when she enters MANA Contemporary (888 Newark Ave.) straight through the spring.
But most of these Umon drawings are far too big to fit in a storybook. Umons, it seems, cannot be easily bound. In their novel bodies, they’ve bounced out of the pages and followed Gross about.
What is an Umon like? The ever-pedagogical Gross provides a key. They’re androgynous (though the artist doesn’t dwell on their genitals), malleable (perhaps indicating their liminal status), bulbous, and at least partially boneless. They appear human, but at least part cetacean — a few of them have blowholes beneath their breasts and shoulderblades. In certain regards, they’re less than you and me: their legs are underdeveloped and at times snakelike, and they must resort to exterior wheels for mobility. They can be funny looking in the literal sense; Gross, who has a good sense of humor, isn’t beyond teasing her characters and her viewers. There is a whiff of the laboratory about them. They are redolent of the circus, too.
The faces of the Umons, however, are beatific. They look upward toward the heavens, but their eyes are often shut. They wear the expressions of those who’ve been sprung free from heavy fetters. Should we X and Y humans get away from the onerous restrictions imposed by our gender roles, maybe we could be self-possessed too.
Curator Kristen DeAngelis and exhibition designer (and MANA creative director) Kele McComsey have bestowed dignity on these pleasant aberrations by treating them like family. Umon pictures hang on both walls and stretch back toward the MANA offices as if they’re portraits of former employees. Gross has done her part by drawing her sex-neutral characters with exquisite sensitivity to the particulars of their fleshy curves, rendering their breasts, bellies, and butts with so many tight parallel lines and crosshatches in ballpoint that these bodies seem to squirm a little under our gaze. Her mischievous pen also generates anatomical impossibilities: levitating body parts, blubbery contortions, exhibitions of improbable single-axle velocity.
The Umon in “Going to the Left Again” balances on a severed lower tentacle, and this violates the laws of gravity, but not, somehow, the laws of probability. The “Happy Couple” are a pair of Umons whose torsos have come completely unstuck from their lower bodies, and their bare chests float above their squiggly bottoms, intertwined like a pair of thick cables. “Talk To Me” finds two Umons conjoined at the waist and sharing a unicycle, while the balloon-like Umon in “Off To Work” balances atop a pair of tiny wheels. The placid Umons proceed with indifference to their flimsy bottom halves. Even when they’re poised to kiss each other, this is a cerebral bunch.
In general, though, Umons do things that we basic humans do. They flirt, they commute, they take joyrides, they keep pets (mostly birds), and they daydream. As “Karpland Liberation Day” demonstrates, they even engage in revolutionary political activity, joining fleshy arms and tiny wheels to raise a flag, Iwo Jima style, with a three-pronged symbol that represents their identity.
Where they differ from us is mostly in their disposition. They have a hermaphroditic sense of completeness and easy satisfaction with themselves that eludes most of us who search for and depend on a mate. In “Umons Alternative Race Accordion Book,” Gross gives us eight double-sided panels connected by metal hinges, each one decorated by characters going about their business, each quite temperate, benignly indifferent to the Umons nearby. It’s an extended book cover without the paper inside, and it’s hard not to think that with the Umons so content, perhaps an elaborate story is unnecessary.
Yet Gross never lets us forget that the Umons, canonically, are a science-mediated mutation. They’re unnatural, and at a time when nature is in peril, that makes them suspect. As a word person, Gross likes to embed lettered messages into her drawings, and these contain references to Bitcoin, globalization, and gene mapping and manipulation; as a dedicated environmentalist, she unashamedly depicts the consequences of runaway consumption.
Three of the hardest-hitting pieces in “The Z Factor” are Umon-affiliated, but don’t possess much Umon content. Instead, amidst washes of red pigment on paper stained by coffee, she’s given us a crab stuck in a plastic bottle and a turtle with a tied plastic bag over its head. In our quest to push into a world beyond gender restrictions — one where we, like God, can be non-binary — we might stop to consider what other systems we might be upending.
It’s been a strong few seasons for illustrators and visual storytellers in Jersey City. At Deep Space Gallery, the provocateur calling himself BARC the dog delighted us with a series of depictions of urban misadventures starring his canine alter-ego. Buttered Roll lit up SMUSH Gallery in late 2024 by putting the South American liberator Simon Bolivar through endless visual permutations. In both cases, the artist showed the visitor a sampling of a rich internal world, complete with mythology and ideology, and tacitly dared us to probe deeper. Cheryl Gross is up to something similar here. She’s provided a powerful enticement to hang out with the Umons — even if the Umons give no indication that they’d like to hang out with you.
(How do you get into MANA Contemporary to see the show? Well, that’s a very good question. MANA is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive art institutions in the New Jersey metropolitan area, and it would be recognized as such if it kept regular hours. As it stands, if you can’t get to MANA for the official opening on Wednesday, March 5 at 5 p.m., your best bet is to schedule a private tour. Or you could wait for MANA to get it together to open more regularly. It has to happen. The staff there puts on great shows, and great shows deserve to be seen — often.)
