“The Void”
- Eye Level
- May 22
- 5 min read
Curator Lucy Rovetto coaxes creative starkness out of the 150 Bay St. crew
Weeds are unloved. Perhaps they shouldn’t be: recalcitrant urbanists ought to admire their tenacity. Nevertheless, the stubbornness of weeds bothers us. They get into cracks and struggle upward, they eat away at foundations, and greedy for daylight, they crowd out the flowers. Gardeners have to dig deep to root them out. Should we falter as a species as it often feels like we might, they’re pretty good candidates to take over the world.
Voraciousness is visible in “Weeds,” a great big hungry sculpture by Robert Koch, a practiced hand at coaxing black welded steel to mimic the wild world outside. Koch’s weeds start, as some weeds do, much taller than a tall man, single steel reeds reaching crookedly toward the ceiling of the ART150 lobby (150 Bay St.) like antennas struck by lightning a few too many times. By the time these stalks reach waist-level, they’ve already splintered into steely tributaries; by the time they’re on the floor, they poke scores of feelers into the white tiles beneath them. It’s impressive, if never quite benign. It may be a vexed pleasure to approach them, but you wouldn’t want to be beneath them.
“Weeds” is the scene-stealer in “The Void,” a group show containing work by a baker’s dozen artists who maintain their studios on the studio building’s second floor. Koch’s own space of creation is a forest of metal: steel seedpods, bushes, and medicine ball-sized cockleburs from corner to corner, and machinery made to accommodate the molten. And sculpture isn’t all he does. Curator Lucy Rovetto has matched Koch’s weeds with a large painting that shares its vertical aspirations. In “#14 from the Under the Influences Series,” the strokes climb from a thatch of color in the belly of the piece, sweeping in flame-like arcs towards the the upper corners of the canvas. Just like the weeds, this piece is firmly rooted, and it’s reaching for something just beyond its grasp.
Will it get there? Or will it, like the third of the big black curves in John Botti’s acrylic painting “Crossroads,” bend under the weight of its own ambitious angles? Botti’s sweeps of black paint, augmented by little streaks and daubs of red and blue, are vectors in search of escape velocity — roadways up and away from the grey. Like Koch’s weeds, they may be operating in the void, but they’re clearly trying to get away from it. Cleverly, Rovetto positions “Crossroads” so it’s plainly visible beyond the steel scrub tops of Koch’s stand of weeds. It could be the Turnpike at night, a ribbon riding over the tops of the goldenrod.
In between the roadway and the reeds, another plant struggles upward. Sculptor Josh Urso has taken the thin trunk of a tree, denuded it of branches, chopped it into cylinders, painted the exposed bits cobalt blue, and reassembled the pieces into a shattered spire. He’s stacked each of the bits of the trunk irregularly, allowing the top and bottom edges of each segment to protrude into space in a most un-glade-like manner. If God had used a glitchy 3D printer on the day of creation, the forest might feel a bit like this. The whole tower leans at a slight angle, but it gives no indication that it’s going to topple.
We’re used to seeing Urso give this treatment to concrete blocks, bashing them, jigsawing the fragments back together, and painting the cracks. This gesture calls attention to the brokenness and the sturdiness of the built environment, and it feels optimistic in a rough-hewn, hyperurban sort of way. Doing the same to a tree (a Christmas tree, no less!) is a darker vision. This is the copse dominated by human beings and their machines — an organic being forced to adapt to a mechanized era, and a comment on how the modern eye apprehends the world unnaturally, in pieces, in bytes of information that we fuse together in the fevered microprocessors of our brains.
Other 150 artists have dipped their toes into the void, too, contributing starker variations on the work we’re accustomed to seeing from them. Resin-slinger Terri Fiore, a sorceress of high-gloss surfaces, gives us three cloud-choked slices of sky, seen at an angle, as if we’re viewing it out of the window of an ascending airplane. The frames, though, are too tight for us to see where we’re going or if there’s trouble on the horizon; wryly, she’s titled them “These Should Be Bigger.” Cheryl Riley hangs a bone-white plaster of Paris mask of her own face directly on the wall, and blindfolds herself with a thick patina of gypsum. Kim Bricker hangs fifteen postcard-sized prints of blurred horizons and loose handshakes between earth and sky in an irregular arrangement like a detective looking for connections between clues. Another 150 favorite steps boldly into the darkness with a tribute to an avant-garde pioneer. Paul Wirhun, who makes colorful, intricate mosaics out of tiny fragments of colored eggshell, hides the paintbox from himself and, in “Hail Malevich,” presents a black square with an off-white border. It is as if the Aztec priest, mid-sacrifice, dropped his obsidian mirror down the steps of the pyramid.
Wirhun and his buddies at 150 appreciate Malevich’s iconoclasm, but they’re too playful to be grim for long. Cast them into the void and they’re likely to crack wise about it; that’s the Jersey way. A typically gorgeous Dorie Dahlberg black-and-white photograph scours the abyss and returns with documentary evidence of an everyday tragedy: a lost bracelet, sitting forlorn in a translucent bag and tied in a loop to a chain link fence. Dahlberg’s shot is a play of textures: the dull gleam of the metal wire of the fence, the shimmer of the mesh sack, and the charms at the bottom, decorating no pretty wrist, minted only to sink into oblivion. How long will these “Forgotten Teenager Jewels” hang there before somebody takes them down? Centuries, perhaps, if the Parks Department leaves them unmolested.
Or maybe not. Maybe an enterprising young girl will rip that sack off the fence in a few days and slip the bangles on to her arm, and, in so doing, remind us that we may all be spared from the bleak netherworld by tricks of fortune. The void is just a place like any other — and as long as we’re ambulatory and possessive of the volition and determination that nature granted a weed, there’s a good chance we could get the hell out of there. Stained glass artist Michi Muzyka provides us with a getaway car, and Rovetto, helpful sort that she is, puts it right at the gallery exit. In “Desert Borealis,” a black roadster revs up on a blue highway and heads towards burgundy mountains under a streaked purple sky. There may be more nowhere waiting around the bend. But there may be something new. We might as well floor it.
(“The Void” closes this weekend. I know; I wish there was more time to see it, too. I got caught up in reviewing Art Fair 14C and didn’t get around to the lobby until yesterday. The lobby is open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and they’re promising a closing chillout with the curator. Chilling out with Lucy Rovetto — a true Jersey City original — is always recommended.)
