Aquatic Dreaming

 

The turtle first caught my eye in this life-aquatic dreamscape mural appearing here on first. Soft, pastel tones a wistful yet pleasant hallucination, water… fish… houses on stilts… but the turtle is obviously a land tortoise not an aquatic terrapin, oh and there seems to be a hut tied to his head.

“References to Hawaii,” says Ekundayo, who was creating the work on a sunny afternoon. "He's from Hawaii, it's where he was raised and the inspiration for these images comes from his past.

 

 

The guy who looks part squid, in the center, who looks like a part of the rebel alliance fighting the empire in Star Wars, who is he? “A friend of mine.”

That is actually part of the street tradition – and by tradition I could mean trend, only time will tell – ultra-personal references. I suspect the faces peaking out of the houses on stilts are also based on some personal acquaintances. I like the inside joke aspect. Not knowing seems to open the art up more to the viewer than knowing. Why is there a squid-man here, or a land tortoise swimming with fishes.

This mural was tricky for me to get a complete picture in one shot with my cheapo camera. A house on stilts is on one end, on the other is another house, not on stilts – both have faces sticking out, as if the houses are squeezed around an entire head of a blue-skinned human, but the house not on stilts has arms attached, has a weird smiled (of course, if you were blue and had a house surrounding your head, you may have a weird smile too) and has a fish perched on his hand.

In the background are trees and the lower portions of the painting show what appears to a be shoreline – land and tides washing up on the sand – yet the large, floating fish abound throughout, part of a Finding Nemo like entourage to the swimming tortoise.

Are we submerged – is this a world we live post-tsunami – where even the raised homes are under the ocean. Is the ocean now everywhere. The title of the mural – Finally, a mural with a TITLE!!!! – is Savage Habit.  Is living by the ocean, say in Hawaii, mean that the savagery of nature, the unyielding and relentless  waves makes the possibility of submersion a reality every moment. Do we adapt by evolving into squid? Is this the world climate change will actually bring? Even in our houses, we are not safe and even when we bring land-based homes in our minds, we still have to adapt to the ocean, return to where we were born, and live a life-aquatic?  Savagery may be a constant risk, but this soggy vision is warm, inviting, invokes no fear.

Is this the dream one has growing up in the tropics, where the ocean surrounds you. Some faces are familiar to you, but you’re dreaming so they look different. The turtle, the fish, they’re familiar to everyone. They’re in our dreams too.

 Ekundayo Website Here

 

Drawing Space

 

 

Victory Hall Drawing Rooms is located at 180 Grand Street and is one of the largest galleries in town and the group show held during the annual artist studio tour featured upwards of two dozen artists. These included: Eileen Ferara, Elizabeth Onorato, Ibou Ndoye, Steve Singer, Margaret Weber, Sandra Desando, Maggie Ens, Mike Markman, Kim Wiseman, Greg Brickey, Jasmine Graf, Glenn Garver, Orlando Reyes, Winifred McNeill, Phil Pellicane, Nyugen E Smith, Heidi Curko, Anne Trauben, Loura van der Meule, Demetrio Alfonso, Geraldine Gaines, 
Cheryl Gross, Jill Scipione, Stephanie Daniels, Megan Klim.

It’s a fascinating space, a former convent – although I might bet it was something before it was a nunnery because there seemed to be an institutional ambiance and while I was told the various rooms were living spaces for the sisters, they seemed rather spacious, about classroom size. Whatever the case, gallery that is now is an engaging showcase for art, a long hall way with rooms opening on side and art everywhere.

The “drawing” was broadly defined – there were some tiny sculptures, though I didn’t get a good picture – and what seemed a be a mini-show-within-a-show featuring high school students – but for the most part, various forms of sketch were the rule of the day.

Margaret Weber had a series of owls – I believe snow owls – occupying one space.

 

 

 

At the end of a hall there was an even a video of Sandy flooding – I think there was a smattering of animation so maybe it could qualify as drawing. Geraldine Gaines was showing African-inspired wood carvings.

Victory Hall Drawing Room is a permanent not a temporary for the tour only gallery, a noteworthy trend in Jersey City. Aside from the drawings, mostly compelling, the space it self, the hall and rooms and what seems like a mysterious past – it certainly wasn’t built to be an art gallery – sparks your curiosity. There’s a lot of corners inspiring wonder what might be around them.

Victory Hall Drawing Roomwebsites.

Philip Nickolas

 

You have to walk up a few flights in this old warehouse on Bay Street where his family operates a rug manufacturing business to get to the madly eclectic studio of Philip Nickolas, an apparently madly eclectic artist. As large as a furniture showroom, one side near the entrance is an elevated painting studio – you know, where he paints his canvases, where abstracted nudes predominate.

Adjacent to that is another workshop area where he makes his steam punk contraptions, like water faucets that look like a metal flowers in a vase or the gears and handle of a old fashioned meat grinder transformed into a lamp, lighting fixtures made out of oil cans.

 

 

 

 

No mere recycling this, not an invention repurposed from necessity– this was an industrial re-imaging of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, familiar objects shedding their familiarity and finding a new juxtaposition, making us re-imagined the boundaries of the ordinary.

Hand-made wooden tables were also on display – and there was also a slightly bigger than a closet sound studio where Philip mixes what I gathered to be a form of techno music.

The imagination at work was as impressive of the realization of that imagination of that work. I became focused on the selection, Picasso-esque nudes and antique or near antique metal objects refashioned into functional objects de art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the industrial age, the concept of alienation first emerged, the worry being that the proliferation of this new fangled mechanization machinery was separating our selves from our humanity. Our digital era has long since dawned, and the overload of information our personal devices provide induces a new wrinkle of alienation. Steam punk – which Philip called his work in the Art Tour brochure– is a romantic reimagining of the Victorian era and that era also coincided with the rise of the railroad, mass production and the internal combustion engine–art movements like surrealism and abstract that followed on the heels of impressionism paintings (not to mention Marx, etc.) were also comments on the rise of alienation in western culture.

How we think about alienation – or maybe, why we think about alienation – is what occurred to me seeing this work in this floor of a warehouse turned into a studio and temporarily a gallery for visitors to come in and gawk at.

The meshing of the repurposed objects with the very human forms emerging like figures from fog, our present day form of alienation making us if not long for, at least feel more comfortable with, the alienation that first heralded the advent of modernism. We identify with a re-imagined past as a way to find solace from, and make sense of, the current anxiety inflicted by the latest chapter of modernism that we find ourselves in.

 

 

 

 

Check out Philip Nickolas FaceBook Page

 

 

 

Cosmic Unity

 

Colorful, symmetrical, circle and angles, on the prayer rug on the floor, candles at the corners. I must’ve missed the séance or yoga class or was too early to add the skulls, roses and dancing bears. Okay, my quarter has run out on my mandala joke meter.

Mandalas  engage us in a hypnotic way – does symmetry exist aside from a duality – the snake eating its tail – we begin and we end and before we begin and after we end there is nothing – but is that nothing inside or outside that circle – the hypnotic engagement – the angle-free geometry both confuses us and gives us focus, add color and light and variations and the mandala does seem other-worldly,  or some how both here and there, the boundary  separating the material and invisible dissolves.

 

 

Cosmic Unity – in an explanation that at times made me suppress my inner editor/English major – talks about the relationship between the individual and the infinite universe. The “5-6” artists were featured in a side room in the vast Tenmarc  building, the warehouse repurposed as central nexus of the Jersey City Artists Studio Tour.

The exhibition featured two spinning  mandalas – not just the illusion of spinning, but actual mandala objects attached to a gizmo that made them go round and round. On the walls were several mandala images, interspersed with some nudes – including photographs a woman in nature, a man whose hands were bound – and a picture (I think some photography was used) of woman whose spine is illuminated by a pattern of new age symbols – more mandalas. The woman is a dark a shadow-like figure, and the symbols are luminescent white. On another wall were more surreal images that incorporated mandala-like geometric symbols,  similar to tattoos one might say.

 

A Jurassic Park-sized rubber plant was in one corner, near a table with tarot cards and candles. The feeling was New Age, unabashedly wallowing in Eastern Spirituality. This mini-gallery within a super-sized gallery housing a loud and crowded arts celebration – with its collection that focused on symmetry naked humanity and some combinations of the – opened up your inner window to deeper revelations.

At one with the cosmos can easily seem like some silly Hippie ideal. One thinks of nature –represented here in some of the photography – as something we are either at one with or isolated from – but what about what is beyond nature.  Why are those atoms evolved into you and me and other atoms are the stars in the sky? Cosmic Unity is not about answering imponderables – it was about just being, the being is the ponderable – like symmetry of a mandala, you accept the ineffable moment of oneness.