“Summer in the City”
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
Hot town: Deep Space celebrates its tenth anniversary with a full-scale art meltdown
A rainbow hangs over the door to Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison). It’s about the size of a small boomerang, the color of Lucky Charms, and the texture of a welcome mat. This plush sign of the covenant is brought to you by enthusiastic yarn-tufter SarahGrace, a regular in these display rooms. Roy G. Biv is a guarantor of inclusiveness, and curators Jenna Geiger and Keith Van Pelt made good on that promise by inviting scores of old favorites to contribute work to “Summer in the City,” the gallery’s volatile tenth anniversary show. But rainbows also come in the wake of downpours. They’re a testament to atmospheric turbulence — the gleaming crowns worn by the storm king.
SarahGrace’s piece sets the mood and the tune for a show that’s gently (and at times even humorously) apocalyptic. Fun it is, as all Deep Space shows are, but the proper response to this hot plate of an exhibition is to pant. Heart-stopping heat radiates from these pieces, many of which could only have come from the sweaty hands and scorched brains of the Garden State’s most talented artists. Human activity might be impaired by the weather disaster our species has created (ask anybody in France), but life goes on anyway, in urban spaces overcooked and microwaved, alternately dried out from drought and flash-flooded from storms and soggy from sprinklers. You’ve been outside lately. You’ve watched the news. Set aside the TV meteorologists: here are the reporters who’ve gotten it right.
And while most of the artists who’ve had solo shows at the gallery made roll call, “Summer in the City” puts this critic in mind of the one Deep Space favorite and regular contributor who couldn’t come to the party. Painter, sculptor, and toy-maker Alexander “BARC the Dog” Lansang inundated these rooms in 2022 with shameless acts of imagination, capturing his cartoon-inspired characters in outrageous predicaments and bear-trapped in infernal machines. BARC, the irascible canine hero of his paintings, eluded capture, explosives, predators, and a hostile environment as he swung, snaggle-toothed, through the urban jungle. Lansang’s comic book and video game avatars felt appropriate to survival in a world (our world) where the difficulty sliders have all been pushed to the Insane setting. Though his city is often a shockwave-strafed minefield, it’s a stimulating place to ride out Armageddon. You wouldn’t want to spend the summer anyplace else.
Lansang’s Wonderbunker partner John Tokar is present and accounted for in “Summer in the City,” and he brings the heat to the show. In his customary clear-lined style, he shows us a skyline of crumbling towers above a desiccated riverbed and an orange sky held up by the pillars of a blown-out bridge. Streetlights are bent, the trees are scrubby, and trucks and cars hang at the sawed-off edges of elevated highways. Over it, the sun is a merciless blaze, roaring, unclouded and unimpeded.
Needless to say, there are no humans present. The summer country has become uninhabitable and intolerable. Many of the other contributors to the show share this view. The big tyrant in the sky is a recurring character, and far from a benign one. In Thomas John Carlson’s painting “Woman in the City,” the sun is a supernova over Manhattan, filling the space between office towers with yellow fire and casting thick beams over sidewalks that seem like they’d singe your hair if your hat fell off. Astonished bystanders shield their eyes from a mirror-headed girl — a modern sun-goddess if ever there was one — who stands in the foreground with a saffron dress and an impertinent posture.
Carlson’s “Woman” straddles the cobblestones of a populated street. Other “Summer” selections are considerably more desolate. For every crowded celebration like Norm Kirby’s “Rooftop Party,” with its lively figures in primary colors dancing atop a bright tenement angled toward the viewer, there’s an evacuated image like Jessica Kat Miller’s painting of empty party chairs on the tar atop a pair of hot pink brownstones. There’s nothing sad or lonely about it; instead, it just feels like it got too hot and everybody has, reasonably, headed for the shade. Hyper-flat painter Keith Garcia, master of the miniature scene, rolls out three matchstick-sized cyclists on a broad ribbon of asphalt in front of a line of squat row houses. One pops a tiny wheelie. But there’s nobody on the sidewalk to appreciate it.
The sense of remoteness that radiates from Garcia’s “Summer Cruise” is amplified by the great swath of institution green overhead. Rarely does “Summer in the City” provide us with blue heavens. Instead, we get the baby aspirin pink atmosphere that marinates Jonté Drew’s protagonist, and the roughly rendered sky, streaked like old rouge in a makeup case, over a deserted reflecting pool in Kirkland Bray’s mysterious “Time Well Spent.” Ben Fine paints the clouds over East Houston Street as wisps of pink. His trees attain the quality of rising smoke. Even the blurred and beautiful sunset, captured in paint from the top of a Berlin club by Leigh Cunningham, feels like the punctuation mark at the end of a scalding day heavy with heathaze. Joe Lotto gives it to us straight: two bent palm trees with segments like desiccated bones, a brick-red backdrop, and a simple caption, underlined by a fallen frond. It reads HOT, all caps, no apologies. (SMUSH gallerist Katelyn Halpern concurs, sewing the words “hot hot heap” into a black plastic tray, ready for the oven.)
Nighttime provides no relief from the weight of the atmosphere or the press of solitude. In Alexander Zastera’s eerie, quiescent “Night Nursery,” a bank of lights peeks out from between links of a cyclone fence. Illumination falls on the green tops of a few unidentified plants, but most of the scene is doused in darkness and thoroughly locked down. The painter’s “Seattle Nightcap” is even creepier, with ectoplasm-colored night light falling on the side of a garage and splattering all over a lawn and curved blue shapes tucked between tree branches. This is an August night on canvas, with everything too moist, too lush, and every emitter of electric light smothered at the source by soup-thick air. Similar refractions haunt a small but effective painting by Kaira Ray Villanueva, whose streetlights push yellow-white cones of brightness into a humid suburban evening. Villanueva loves sci-fi, and her white lamps do look more than a bit like arriving UFOs.
How are urbanites fighting back against the barometer, and the thermometer, and all that has accompanied climate disaster? As best as they can, but not very effectively. Ice cream is a popular remedy, and the wagons that deliver it to coin-clutching kids on street corners are treated like rescue helicopters. Max Budnick and Francisca Reyes, poets of the domestic, park a miniaturized replica of a Mr. Softee, barely bigger than a Tonka truck, on a wooden platform in the corner of the gallery and fit it with plastic wheels, glittering reflectors, and other details. It’s all done with the reverence of an Eastern Orthodox penitent creating an iconostasis.
Yet even the holy soft-serve mobile is no match for a roasted road. Merciless Elliot Lobell brings us a cut-out illustration of a grounded truck with tires as melted as a vanilla cone face down on a hot sidewalk. Gremlins with worried looks hover around the vehicle, but the big mischief-maker in the sky bears the ultimate responsibility — well, the sun and we abettors on earth who are busily driving up the mercury with our activities. In Nathalie Kalbach’s “Last Call,” the image of the Softee logo is fading, and the windows of the truck are dark; there’ll be no more frozen treats today.
Then there’s the summertime activity that epitomizes temporary and illicit relief: popping open the fire hydrant. Amelia Shields, channeler of childhood hopes, paints us a gusher, pouring forth water in a loose blue arc from a crack in its face. The water that puddles up in the bottom right hand corner of her canvas looks like it’s no match for searing air that has resolved to the color of flame. August Goulet returns to the image of the spewing hydrant several times, including a photograph of an earnest spray directed against the day and several prints that amplify the desperation of the gesture.
And as for the poor animals who can’t pry open a pipe or pay for a bomb pop, they’re left to cope with the consequences of the cruel summer we’ve made as best as they can. Wendy Setzer’s mad-eyed squirrel, painted in magma orange and cobalt blue, leans and clings to its nut as the air around it seems to aerosolize into particles of heat. Ceramicist Shamona Stokes, the community director at Elevator, sculpts a black dog that sags and droops in the middle like a drenched rope bridge; oil painter Jodi Gerbi lets her lion roar out its disapproval in our direction; NTEL perches an immigrant sparrow on a branch against a tall wall that wards against parched invaders; Cheryl Gross directs a column of orange ink down on the heads of a pair of dignified pigeons.
Most outraged of all is the spotted cat in Kyle Orlando’s brutal little black and white painting “Side Closet.” This feline embodiment of summer is mean-faced, leopard-spotted, curved like a lizard, and shooting out stars and clouds. Cactuses grow from the ground that it pawns, and at its hind quarters, a crescent moon explodes into flame. The cat-figure, one that reappears in many of Orlando’s paintings, is as cartoonish as BARC the Dog, and it works for the same reason BARC does. The world that we inhabit no longer plays by the physical rules we once recognized. Only something crude, and outsized — monstrous, yet identifiable — gets at our present anxieties.
So we retreat to the house and turn on the cooling system, and hope for the best. If we’ve got the money for it, climate control comes with our apartment. Many of us in older Jersey City buildings have to go old-school. Amy Hill Hyman’s “Window Unit” isn’t the most immediately grabby painting in “Summer in the City,” but for a certain kind of Hudson County resident, it might be the most resonant: a portrait of our thin line of defense against the encroachment of the heat. The air conditioner pokes its humble plastic grill from the lower panel of a bay window in a typical apartment. We know it’s ridiculously warm outside because of the sun-bleached colors of the foliage on the trees and the buildings nearby, and because of the skill with which Hyman captures the light on the translucent, rickety accordion plastic that holds the unit in place. No doubt it’s on full blast. No doubt the besieged residents have their fingers crossed that it won’t fail. With the red tag from the appliance store still visible, a tangled power cable snakes its way across the worn parquet floor. It looks as if it might be fraying. If it shorts out, what then?
