Tape, Transparency & Translucency

 

Impending Spring is a new show by Kayt Hester in a new space, the Wix Lounge.

I’m not one hundred percent sure about the space is exactly, except that it was spacious, airy and uncluttered and located over there by Chelsea Way, Wix Lounge (235 W 23rd St, 8th Floor) . 

The Wix lounge, which by all accounts may be open to the public and free to use, a kind of Starbucks without the coffee and is hosted by the Wix, an internet-services company.

 

 

 

Essentially the I didn’t get all the details, about the space. in  The opening featured wine and oysters and seemed well attended.

The way Kayt turned the space into a gallery show was that she was using Wix (a web-service provider that also hosts the Wix Lounge space) for her snazzy new website and while solving a technical issue with tech-support and her work got noticed and the powers that be decided a Hester exhibit would be a compelling fit for the art gallery potential of the lounge, a kind of an open source office (the concept apparently was first conceived in California).

I shouldn’t give into a snarky tone, It is a beautiful space, enhanced the art display, and was well-lit and comfortable to spend time in.

Impending Spring is the title of the exhibit, an expression of mid-winter hope. Hester often draws inspiration from the seasonal changes  (her recentJersey City show celebrated Summer) of the natural world. She doesn’t like the cold and snow and ice, preferring the warmer times of year, thus the title. She can’t wait for Spring even though wait we all must.

While the walls feature some classic Hester depictions – masking tape on canvas – what makes this show unique are images exclusive to the Wix Lounge show that decorate wall to ceiling windows enclosing the inner-board room located mid-lounge, a white-collar terrarium.

Not the first time working for Hester making most of glass as the background. Both the properties of the innate transparency of glass and how the glass is  positioned in terms of available light are utilized in the work. In fact, it’s wrong to consider it a background, a mere canvas. The glass itself was as much of part of the Hester medium as the masking tape.

Images of a caribou (this may or may not have something to do with the post-punk  band, The Pixies), stark telephone poles, connecting cables, a woman’s pensive gaze, a bunny, an owl whose claws clutch an umbrella (I find umbrellas objects of beauty, says Hester).

 

 

 

 

 

Always a marvel how she can express so much tape meticulously cut into tiny pieces , but aside from that adhesive material, the equally amazing aspect is how she expressed so much with so little, a dash, a roundness, a slash and an image is realize complete with suggested movement and feeling. The awareness of what is not said seems at the root of her image making.

I love the caribou’s open jaw, a call of the wild or how the owl seems to rise in flight, wings spread – the umbrella some amusing accidental clash between nature and civilization – spring comes no matter how advanced our technology or populated our cities.

When standing within the glass-enclosed board room and looking out, the images are like auroras, They become shadows , but not casted on the wall by light, but existing between the light and the wall.

By balancing  positive and negative space, that is, black tape eliminating portions of what is transparent to creating something new, Hester has conjured an illusion of translucency. The result is a kind of 3-D – or maybe 4-D – montage of images making viewers not just see what appears to be a projection, but actually feel like they are inside the projection, part of it.

We live in an era of art where exhibitions occur in spaces that were not typically galleries. Interiors are being repurposed so rampantly that now almost anywhere can serve as a showcase.

Visual Art utilizes shadows, light and space to convey ideas and emotions.  Impending Spring is not just art in a new space, but Hester makes that space part of the art. It both contains and becomes her vision.

To experience the illusion of translucency, , when visiting Impending Spring, go inside the glass room and look out.

 

 

 

Carolina’s Christmas Window

Penguin. Snow drifts. Christmas Tree.

 

 

 Luis, the resident artist at Carolina’s Laundry, painted holiday scenes on the window the freakishly balmy  Saturday  before Christmas. He painted the 9-11 memorial mural that was there for years and the sign hanging inside, there for 20 years, since the opening of the establishment.

 

 

Carolina’s been closed for more than 18 months. There was a fire in the 4-story building. The Laundromat takes up the ground floor, the other sections are residential units. They are still unoccupied, the residents remain displaced. That’s where the fire started and was mostly contained; Carolina’s was relatively unscathed. None of the equipment was damaged.

Merna, one of the sunniest folks in the neighborhood, also owns and operates the bodega on Newark & Varick, a block away. She’ll improve anyone’s day just by saying hi (her preferred greeting is how ya doin). She named the Laundromat after her daughter, who just finished college but was still doing shifts at both family businesses.  

Family business are the lifeblood of a neighborhood.  Residents here are lucky to have this one back, fresh holiday imagery decorating the corner.

 

 

 

 

Urban Realism Building Windows

Blair Urban participated in the Art Activates Alley MuralProject blogged about here. Her website is here.

She painted this water/sky/earth/city mural on Newark Avenue.

Seeing bodies of water always induces a kind of dreamy tranquility. All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not filled says Ecclesiastes, a line I never tire of quoting. Murals recently popped up on buildings throughout Jersey City, a city-sponsored project that I am still catching up with and that brought together bare building exteriors with artists and making available municipal cherry-picker vehicles so artists could reach the heights necessary to make their vision a reality.

This vast uncanny, deceptively realistic mural is on the western side of an edifice on the northern side of Newark Avenue.

Water dominates the image, that substances that covers most of our planet and from where our protoplasm-souls crawled out to evolve into our now urban-souls passing by this mural that demands to be noticed as go to work or love during what we call linear time.

 

The water is forefront, yet is essentially blank, a simple suggestion yet lots of room for our minds to freely roam, lots of a sort of nothingness as the obvious focal point, which is clever in and of itself but then nothing about this mural is obvious. It’s not just water but also the equally blank sky that occupies its center-point, a seemingly lack of detail compels our attention, just like looking at real water and seeing the empty sky as your field of view expands seeking the horizon.

That horizon though is a city, the geometric skyline of rectangles, a far away life we assume is more exciting than ours. The foreground is lonely but just as crucial in the framing of the central liquid/sky emptiness – a thicket of tall marsh grass, gently swaying in an invisible breeze. In one corner (often a car is parked here, dammit!) are faintly visible railroad tracks.

In the upper corner is a branch, reddish-pink leaves – we’re in forever autumn and where we are sitting we see the city but also another similar shore to the one we where we now sit, stark and rustic and definitely not urban like our horizon that divides the greenish, overcast sky from the bluish water. What a subtle yet astonishing artistic choice – the sky has a hue of a water, the water the hue of sky, each reflecting the other.

Then you realize, this setting pictured on the wall is a place in Jersey City, the fading tracks are those abandoned Central Jersey Line, unused for more than half a century, those vestiges of our nation’s glorious railroad past, you see along outlying inland areas of Liberty State Park, where closes to Hudson bay there are stretches of grassy shores, from which the view contains both Manhattan and Bayonne, the other rocky inlet. This mural depicts the view of we looking out from our Jersey City Isthmus. What is seen tells us as much about who is doing the seeing as it does about the physical visage that is viewed.

Then we get to the windows, the actual real windows of life as we know it on this building that now and before this painting was a building doing what a building always does, housing occupants for whatever reason its occupants require this housing. The object is as indifferent to the art as the art is to what it depicts and the feelings, thoughts and notions that depiction invokes in those who see it. Here, the artist uses these windows as part of her expression. She doesn’t avoid them or ignore them, she seems to paint around them but in such a way that the windows become surrealistic entities within this watery pastoral of sky and shoreline and distant city. They recall Salvador Dali as they give us an interior doubt that protests against our acceptance of an unqualified faith in the ultimate truth of an exterior reality. The windows have a functional purpose for the building, but the artist incorporates this medium in her message. They are transmuted from functional to the aesthetic, they now seem designed into the whole of the visual. It’s as if the windows only exist because of this painting. The windows new reality is for us to ponder our own assumptions of what is real.

Windows show us things we would never otherwise see, but those places are where we happen not to be. Whether we hope to go there or whether seeing the distance makes us happier with where we are has nothing to do with the window, and ultimately more to do with us – and the unknown future that is part of our burden or mortality – than the there in the distance. Windows show us where we are not while also reminding us we are where we are.

The Windows float in the sky, are incorporated in the city skyline and as part of a distance imaginary heavens above a city of buildings. The windows allow us to dream away the loneliness of the tall grass and tree and abandoned railroad tracks.

 

 

Paint the Car

The story, according to Ray Schwartz and his wife, Beth, is that the car drives like a dream but after a couple of accidents, one involving a NJ Transit bus, it was dented and bland. They offered it to Uta Brauser, founder and proprietress of the oft-beleaguered Creative Grove as an art project.

Throughout the year, Uta has taken refrigerators and used them as canvasses, inviting people to paint whatever, sort of taking graffiti and street art, and the general inclination of visual spontaneity into a public space. Ray & Ben decided why not do something similar to the family vehicle. It doesn’t look that great to begin with, they said, why not turn the beat up automobile into art instead?

So, on the last Creative Grove before the Christmas Sales season is in full swing, the public art project of Paint the Car was held.

 

Interactive Art?

Highly.

Performance Art?

Partially.

I was reminded of those contests where people take turns destroying a car, hammering it with a sledge hammer, or they win prizes, often the car, when people keep their hands on a car and whoever can keep it on for the longest is the winner.

This was about endurance, it was just about passing inspiration. I went early in the event, saw the first squiggly line effacing the freshly washed paint job. Came about back an hour later. More artists were working. Everyone was strangely solemn, not in a overly serious or sad way; but they didn’t want to just create meaningless lines. There was a focus and intention by each person who picked up a brush.

The project was open to everyone, but it seemed most of the folks not only had some talent, but wanted to apply a worthwhile image, no matter how simple or fleeting. A visual idea had formed in their minds and they wanted to express that idea as accurately as possible given the spontaneous nature of the event and the imperfect canvas of an automobile. The process of paint expressing barely deliberated thought was fascinating to watch.

Art argues against conformity. What is more conformist than a solid color car, so bound by design and traffic laws, Paint the Car was a fun art event, but maybe it spoke to an inner desire many of us share. Why must all cars look the same mono-color? Why can’t a car be as unique as its driver?

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