Nicholas D’Ornellas: “A Last Look”

An over-the-shoulder glance at an old home through the thick filters of life in the United States

Once a home, now a fading afterimage (photo by Brooke Wainwright)

Do you remember how it felt to leave an apartment behind? Do you remember your kitchen, once a font of life and nourishment, barren and stripped of your familiar possessions, naked, staring back at you, suddenly alien? What about your bedroom once you’d dragged the mattress away? Was there a permanent imprint on the floor like a photonegative? Or had every sign of you vanished? Did you search for traces and marks that proved your time there wasn’t an illusion? Or did you turn the key one final time without a parting glance at where you’d been?

That might depend on where you were going. If you’d made a clean break from your past, it might not have been so hard to shut the door on an old apartment and leap straight into the future. But if continuity was important to you, you might find emotional residue on every empty shelf and windowsill. 

In “A Last Look,” printmaker and photographer Nicholas D’Ornellas says a mournful goodbye to a Jersey City place where he used to live. Text superimposed over some of the twenty-four panels in the installation hint that the parting may not be happening on the best terms. Everything about these images speaks of transience — movement, unsettlement, absence, dangling conversations, dwindling twilight, and days between days.

D’Ornellas and Mana Contemporary (888 Newark Ave.) curator Kristin DeAngelis have hung these panels in a tight grid: four by six, on a dark gray wall, with very little room between them. From a distance, they seem to cohere into a single unframed work. In a way, they are one. They’re an expression of a peculiar feeling of in-betweenness that most urbanites know. When you’ve got your stuff in a storage unit and no place to forward your mail, the indeterminacy of life plays funny tricks on your identity. There’s a strange invisibility that accompanies time spent without a permanent address. For the lucky among us, that sensation only lasts a short time before they move in to their new home. In “A Last Look,” the Guyanese-born D’Ornellas makes a subtle but clear case that that weightlessness never entirely fades for immigrants — even when they’re in the same flat for years.

Interior decoration: "A Last Look" in detail. (Photo by Brooke Wainwright)

Unconventional materials help the artist tell his story. Some of D’Ornellas’s panels are wrapped in sheets; others are slathered with housepaint; others bear stitched spiral patterns in pink thread and netting in mesh. He’s screen-printed his home photographs directly on to surfaces that already feel domestic. The texture of the panels amplifies the grainy, faraway quality of the prints and the slight but unmistakable transgressive quality that the entire installation radiates. At times, it feels like we’re peeking through a screen door into somebody else’s kitchen. Other panels could be stills from in-store surveillance footage. D’Ornellas’s colors are muted and maybe a little exhausted. Like everything else captured in “A Last Look,” they feel lived-in.

But the rooms are empty. There’s nothing in the closets, nothing in the sink, no pan atop the unlit burners of the stove. Even the windows are impossible to see through. Some details are discernible: the tiles on the bathroom floor, linoleum in the kitchen, shelves of a pantry stripped bare. From the light fixtures and the fenestrations alone, it’s clear that the occupants of this house weren’t wealthy. Architecture and interior design like this is designed to be functional, not flashy. The builders are not expecting anyone to stay forever, or even to want to. After making this place a home, the D’Ornellas family has successfully expunged it of any particular presence. It’s ready for the new occupant, and that occupant will, in turn, give it over to the next Jersey City resident attempting to make her way in a place as alienating as the USA.

A wall of messages. (photo by Brooke Wainwright)

Was Nicholas D’Ornellas surprised by the ease with which something as private as a family home could be returned to public circulation? Did he think he’d be here forever, or did he always feel the impermanence of the lodger? We can’t say for sure, but some of the superimpositions on the panels provide a pretty big clue. On a few of the panels — not too many, but enough to make an impression — the artist has reprinted some of the family correspondence. The letters are faded, but they’re still recognizably formal. They’re typed, not handwritten. At least one has a company logo. Another is an official medical opinion from a doctor concerning a head injury suffered by the artist’s sister. 

None of these letters are tragic. There are no eviction notices, no rejections of coverage from insurance companies, no threatening posts from the police. Taken collectively, though, they make the atmosphere hum and crackle with peril. It’s hard not to feel the tonal contrast between the humble D’Ornellas home and the hard, sterile language in the medical evaluation. One doesn’t fit the other. Yet there they are, inextricable — the official correspondence screen-printed right on top of the muted and distressed photograph of the bathroom. Meaningfully, D’Ornellas makes his panels the same size as a standard letter. Encounters with authorities are part of the frame through which reality is accessed. Home and relationships determine the flavor of life for D’Ornellas, but outside forces determine its shape. 

Through symbol, color, texture and allusion, a portrait of a family emerges in “A Last Look.” Though we never see them, we know who these people are. They’re as American as anybody in this hemisphere, but their position in the United States is more marginal than they’d like it to be. Though powerful ties bind them to each other, tenuousness hovers over their situation. Their relationship to authority is — for good reasons — freighted with no small amount of fear. Life at home is controllable, sort of; life outside the walls isn’t even visible. 

A kitchen, waiting.

We don’t know where the D’Ornellas family has moved to, or whether they’ve bettered their position. What we do know is that when Nicholas D’Ornellas turns back toward the home he’s left and surveys it for a final time, he does it through thick filters: the near-palpable love he’s felt for the place and those in it, the letters he’s received from officials threatening and benign, the destabilizing force of travel, the distorting power of aspiration and happenstance.

Like many photo exhibitions that showcase a personal archaeology, “A Last Look” also has something to say about memory, and the way in which images in our mind degrade and become granular over time.  We may remember the structural characteristics of houses better than we recall the contents of rooms.

Then again, we may not. Typically, it’s the little things that stay in our minds, and D’Ornellas, to his credit, hasn’t mounted a memoir on Mana’s walls. Instead, he’s captured a specific mood: one that we associate with endings, mis-fittings, slips off of the grid, and time spent in transit between destinations. For those Americans who might already feel vulnerable to erasure, it’s particularly poignant to cross the threshold for the final time, shut off the lights, and close the door. 

(One of the many counterintuitive things about Mana Contemporary: the office is one of the most accessible places in the institution. It’s right by the first floor Hybrid Café in the lobby, and it’s generally open whenever the Mana doors are open. Nicholas D’Ornellas’s installation is on the other side of the wall in the middle of Cheryl Gross’s show.)