Jack Henry: “Metamorphosis”
- Eye Level
- Feb 22
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 25
The décollage artist and sculptor brings a feather-light touch to a heavy subject: the earth, with all its complex and challenging dimensions.
Jim Fischer may have decamped to Rochester, but he’s still remembered fondly by believers in the suggestive power of accident. In “Imagination: Serendipitous Reality,” a terrific 2022 show at Casa Colombo, Fischer exhibited a series of pieces assembled from paint scraps. When he looked at these multicolored tea leaves, he saw trouble: legendary battles, violent stories from the Bible and world literature, horsemen of the apocalypse. After a few clever amendments from his own paranoid paintbrush, his vision became our vision.
Jack Henry is a different kind of creator with a softer kind of soul. The New York City multimedia artist hasn’t got battefields behind his eyelids, and he isn’t inclined to make direct literary allusions. Yet he, too, consults the oracle. Henry’s method of divination — his artistic dice-throw — involves décollage, or the residue left when old and treated paper is pulled off of a blank surface. Like Fischer, he receives the gifts that his materials have given him. Fischer hears the thunder of arms and feels the coming of cataclysm; Henry, gentler but no more optimistic, hears the whistling breeze in the endangered forest and feels the slow degradation of the natural world at the hands of those who take it for granted.
In “Metamorphosis,” now on view in the wainscoted foyer of the Majestic Theatre Condominiums (222 Montgomery St.), Henry presents himself as a graceful but agitated naturalist: an appreciator of the wild whose refusal to overstate reads as a testament to his conservationism. His work is pleasant to look at; it does not shout from the wall or perturb passersby. But an impression of unease lingers.
The twenty sculptures and décollage pieces shown by Henry and the curatorial team Wandering Lights (that’s Jenna Geiger and Keith Van Pelt of Deep Space Gallery and sculptor and Elevator community director Shamona Stokes) hum with depictions of the outdoors, including caves, stony slopes, stony shorelines, and mountain frost. This is where the accidents of décollage have led him. Henry has turned to these games of chance for the same reason that anybody throws bones or turns cards in the fortune-teller’s tent. He’s worried about the future, and he’s determined to glean what he can from found objects and found symbolic language. The tone of his art is urbane, and often, you can see price tags, logos, and other residue of commerce in the pictures he's fashioned. But his mind is on the wilderness.
He captures its inhospitality in detail. “Geyser,” for instance, is all emphatic vectors of wind and steam; “Cave Opening” a clutch of jagged stalagmites hovering over a narrow passage. “Smoke on the Horizon,” one of the most aesthetically successful pieces in an accomplished show, gives us puffy clouds of unknown origin over a bleak-looking field. The “Mountain” looks like a bear to climb, the “Rough Seas” are no place for a swimmer, and the “Expanse” is as daunting as a Roger Dean-scape from the gatefold of the most outlandish Yes album. Other décollage pieces allude to natural (and sometimes tectonic) forces while preserving the semi-abstract feel that a viewer might expect from artworks begun by courting happenstance. “Compression” uses wavering lines of ink to connote the impossible pressure of sedimentary layers, while “Stack,” a gorgeous piece, feels like a tumble of stone, cliffs, and waterways, all pretty to look at but quietly forbidding.
Attuned to the heaviness of nature though he is, Henry takes pains to avoid visual friction. His lines are rarely thick, and his surfaces, especially in the five part “Displacement,” have the elusive quality of a fading dream. Whispering pieces like “Clouds” could be keys in Victorian storybooks — the last image that the characters see before falling through the looking-glass. It’s usually winter in Henry’s outdoor world, and the palette is winter-appropriate and, at times, surprisingly industrial: antifreeze blues, dirty-snow browns, concrete grays and tar black, all judiciously applied in the artist’s small, winsome pictures (most of these works don’t exceed twenty inches across) of the rugged natural world. Have people ever been to these places? What would they leave behind if they got there? The lightness of his touch feels like more than an aesthetic decision. It’s a respectful tiptoe, an expression of caution made by an an observer worried about perturbing the beast and waking something up.
And if that isn’t clear from the décollage, it’s absolutely apparent in Jack Henry’s sculptures. Two of the most intriguing hang on the wall like medicine cabinets: they’re called “Wilderness,” but this synthetic forest is less than pristine. In these vertical boxes, Henry has fitted resin versions of objects a person might find on a woods walk, including translucent ferns, broken twigs, flower petals, and fallen leaves pockmarked with caterpillar holes. So far, so bucolic. He’s also cast other objects that a hiker might be familiar with, including a case of cigarettes, chains and cables, and the discarded top of a plastic cup. The garbage has been immortalized in the same cream and faded rose-colored resin as the leaves and buds. To our eye, they’re all planted in the same soil. We expect them to be there. It feels slightly dishonest when they aren’t.
Two other three-dimensional pieces are high-speed collisions of the sort of human detritus that a trash-picker might find after trawling a trail. “Jetsam” is an amalgam of junk, artfully-arranged, hostile to nature, but still so featherweight in the hands of the sculptor that it seems to levitate. These pieces align Henry with the long Jersey tradition of making beauty out of found objects that other people have discarded; see, for instance, the work of Terri Fraser, whose sculptures are a fair appraisal of the joys and tribulations of a Hunterdon County first ramble. Juxtaposed with the two-dimensional pieces, they contain a warning. We don’t own the natural world. We barely know it. We’re part of it: it lives within our unconscious and guides our thoughts. But it wasn’t made for us. We take chances with it at tremendous risk.
(The Majestic Theatre Condominiums might seem like an odd duck, but its foyer is a very good and pleasantly dramatic place to see a show: the old-school architectural details and stairway to points unknown make it feel like a side-chamber of the Met. Silverman Building, the arts-friendly developer, has been throwing exhibitions in there for many years. It’s locked most of the time — it is, after all, a residential property — but it’s not too hard to contrive a way in if you’d like to see the show. You’re encouraged to contact the curators at @wanderinglightsprojects and the managers at info@silververmanbuilding.com.)
