“The Crossing,” by Ginger Andro and Chuck Glicksman, at The MORA Museum of International Art in Jersey City.
Most artistic representations of The Brooklyn Bridge are unabashed paeans to it. “The Crossing,” by Ginger Andro and Chuck Glicksman, isn’t in that category. The installation is not short on grandeur: it occupies an entire room on the second floor of The MORA Museum of International Art in Jersey City and contains visual, auditory and even olfactory elements. It also possesses the constructive resourcefulness that New York is famous for. The two artists have managed to evoke the cinematic sweep of the bridge with little more than mirrors, plywood and cables. Seen from another angle, though, the piece becomes a snarl of wire and a web for the unwary to get stuck in. How much of the city’s greatness you can access, “The Crossing” seems to say, depends very much on your position and your perspective.
To underscore the piece’s themes, Andro and Glicksman have mounted a pocketful of plexiglass dollars on the wall across from the bridge. No dead presidents here; instead, each is decorated with an iconic photo of figures from popular culture, including ones of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Patti Smith. “Commodify or die,” the funny money reads, reminding us that The Brooklyn Bridge is a structure often sold to the gullible.
Ambivalence about the metropolis pervades “Crossing the Hudson,” a boneshaker of a show featuring haunted work by 39 members of The Sculptors Guild, one of those old-fashioned New York City meritocratic arts collectives that other towns often try to approximate but never quite can. The Guild lists many famous names among its alumni, including Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Louise Bourgeois, profoundly influential sculptors all. As “Crossing the Hudson” demonstrates, today’s Guild members carry on their forerunners’ commitment to excellence — and their anxiety about life as it is lived in the nation’s biggest city.
They haven’t gone far from it. MORA is a short walk from Exchange Place, the first stop in the Garden State. The towers of the Battery are visible from the museum’s steps. These New Yorkers have been summoned to the left bank of the river by a New Jersey artist: Tina Maneca, an experienced and imaginative curator. She has handled the material and the space with similar sensitivity, designing a show that is loaded with thematic incident and visual happenstance but never feels like it is crowding the viewer. Instead, this bustling subway car of an exhibition moves fast and covers plenty of ground. As with many connections between New York and New Jersey, it reveals how much we have in common, and how far apart we are, too.
“Chainged Vertebrae,” by Miller Opie.
Followers of New Jersey sculptors such as Robert Lach, Amanda Thackray, Anthony Boone and Jodie Fink — all of whom make fantastic objects from discarded materials and the byproducts of industrial processes — will find much that is familiar about “Crossing the Hudson.” Eric David Laxman’s “Sacred Heart” turns a pockmarked, rusted, deeply dignified face of found-metal steel toward the rest of the exhibition. Gorgeous junk springs from the head of Lannie Hart-Lewis’ “Up From the Ruins #2,” as if her subject, hopeful with chin upturned, has found a new way to envision old ideas. Meg Bloom bunches up fibrous homemade paper and fixes it on the wall like bunting; Alberto Bursztyn’s “Bugbots” bestow an insect resurrection to laboratory waste; Miller Opie coaxes surprising elegance out of a black chain and the spinal bones of a cow. Lucy Hodgson’s “Little House on the Pipeline,” in which the sculptor affixes a heavy, mute metal box (and an antler) atop a winding column of plumber’s steel, would have fit in perfectly at recent MANA Contemporary shows confronting environmental precariousness.
Other pieces in “Crossing the Hudson” are made from materials not often seen in the small, modest galleries of Hudson and Essex Counties. New Jersey gallery-goers accustomed to gazing on beautified trash may well concede that there is something to be said for splurging on precious stone. Karen Dimit serves up sumptuous alabaster in three melting flavors: raspberry, wizards mist, and golden sunshine. The gypsum wonders continue with Janice Mauro’s “River View,” a sleek square of painted orange stone propped over a resin dish like a computer monitor hewn from a quarry. Margherita Serra keeps things classical with “Passion,” a scene in Carrara white marble. Simon Rigg ups the ante with “Pink Dreams,” a captivating riddle of bends, curves, handles and knobs — a sessile serving tray carved from lustrous, sparkling pink marble from Portugal.
Judith Peck’s “Waiting for Lobster.”
Many of the best (if not necessarily the happiest) pieces in the show are cast in bronze — another material infrequently seen in local galleries. Elizabeth McCue commits to a flurry of bronze leaves, and blows up a foliage storm on the walls of the entrance gallery. Leah Poller fashions a tiny bronze gurney with the care of a model-airplane assembler and the freaked-out, fidgety fastidiousness of a patient trying to distract herself in the doctor’s office. The imperious subject of Judith Peck’s terrific “Waiting for Lobster” sits pert in a chair with hands on her hips, bib on, head up, scanning for the tardy waiter. Maneca has cleverly juxtaposed it with Jessica Ramirez’s diaphanous “Still,” a sheet of fiberglass and resin that the sculptor has rolled and folded into a posture resembling that of a cross-legged and expectant young woman.
The women sculpted by Peck and Ramirez have more in common than impatience. They are both faceless. The characters in “Crossing the Hudson” are often shrouded or occluded: Irene Christensen’s drawn woman peeking out from behind an inked veil; Howard Kalish’s stalking “Eve,” slim, black, restless, and devoid of eyes; Katee Boyle’s creepy “Seven Sisters,” a family of pale dolls with quizzical faces and dresses soaked in Victorian era soot. In Chia Hsuan Kuo’s white ceramic “Passing,” a group of stoop-shouldered Gothamites appear to be getting subsumed by the built environment of the city.
Gay Malin’s “How Can You Know Me? I Have No Face.”
In the piece that best reflects the tenor of this uncompromising show, Gay Malin rudely stuffs the head of her featureless bust with wood chips. The viewer of “How Can You Know Me? I Have No Face” can select a personality from a booklet attached to the figure’s chest, or leave it shut and consign the subject to anonymity.
Even sculptures that are not, on their surface, images of human beings exude worry about the slipperiness of identity. Michael Wolf’s chilly “Amerika” extends the New Yorker’s distress about impermanence to the rest of the country. The sculptor drapes a lead American flag over a house-shaped slab of wood. The home is almost entirely smothered and blackened by the standard, but a corner of it peeks out. In other “Crossing the Hudson” pieces, individuals are losing their senses of themselves in the immensity of the crowd. Here, the American way of life is slipping out of view, choked by the homogenizing, deadening effects of nationalism.
Wolf is getting at a universal problem that is felt with uncommon acuteness in New York. The big town across the river is the seat of our societal institutions — and institutions that are supposed to be bringing us together are, lately, pulling us apart. Emil Silberman lampoons the church in “The Confession,” but there is real pain motivating the visual joke. The sculptor presents us with two bone white plaster busts: one, a priest, metal-crowned and unconcerned, and two, a penitent, gaunt and distressed, leaning toward the slats on the louvre door that separates the men. The confessor is wary but desperate to be heard; the curate is haloed, distracted, self-impressed. They will both go home without establishing any real connection, far from God, swamped and bleached by the impersonality of the city.
It is a reminder, as so much of “Crossing the Hudson” is, that New York is a fascinating, overwhelming, dramatic place. But if it’s all the same, we’ll stay right where we are.
“Crossing the Hudson” runs through July 30 at The MORA Museum of International Art in Jersey City. It is on view Saturdays from 4 to 7 p.m., Sundays from 6 to 8 p.m., and Tuesdays by appointment. Visit moramuseum.org.
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