Arts Annual at Montclair Art Museum puts hopeful spin on ‘Exploring Our Connections’ theme

Dan Fenelon’s “Tempest Tost” is part of the “Exploring Our Connections” exhibition at The Montclair Art Museum.

We are self-interested and discontent. We are cruel to immigrants and outsiders. Our history is one of oppression, injustice and unspeakable acts. We human beings are real pieces of work.

The contributors to the New Jersey Arts Annual at the Montclair Art Museum are frank about all of that. The 61 artists in this multifaceted group show agree that we have been through a lot, and our reactions to challenges and trauma haven’t always ennobled us.

Yet the painters, photographers, sculptors, videographers and textile artists selected by jurors Philemona Williamson, Kimberly Callas and Todd Caissie and assembled by MAM chief curator Gail Stavitsky haven’t surrendered to despair. Instead, they have chosen to emphasize the links we have to the others around us: our families, our societies, our fellow congregants. The show, which is titled “Exploring Our Connections,” doesn’t merely encourage us to pay attention to friends and neighbors. It asks us to straddle time and generations and situate ourselves in a human lineage, and understand where we are going by recognizing where we have been.

The result is an optimistic show in a pessimistic time. The exhibition insists that no matter what has happened to us, we can ground ourselves, and recover our identities, by reaching out to others.

Is it really that simple? Can we beat the 21st Century blues by rejecting alienation and reconnecting to heritage, community and kin? The show acknowledges that those connections have taken a beating lately. Dislocation and diasporic forces have shaken the leaves off of too many family trees. Memories of lost loved ones can be painful to consider.

“A Last Look — Bedroom No. 2,” by Nicholas D’Ornellas.

But even the saddest pieces in the Arts Annual — and there are many sad ones — assume that the ties that bind are worth the costs of maintenance. Even “A Last Look,” Nicholas D’Ornellas’ somber screen print of a solitary man on the verge of leaving an apartment, is heavy with the gorgeous residue of recollection. There was a family here once. Listen carefully, and you might hear the whispers of beloved ghosts.

Other clans hang together, even under duress. Frank Ippolito’s lightbox is barely sufficient to contain the weary, restless energy of a migrant family. Their faces and huddled bodies are discernible through the fog and mist, and they appear to be pressing at the glass in a plea for succor. They may not be welcomed by the viewer, but they’ve got each other.

“Exploring Our Connections” has many such images of transit, and groups of people who, like kids in the back seat on a summer drive, seem awfully eager to get where they’re going.

“Home for the Holidays,” Steven Kushner’s photograph of a Satmar family at the Lackawanna Station in Hoboken, finds something holy about the in-between places where people on the move gather.

Susan Sinek’s suggestive little two-panel study in graphite and gold leaf of her “Sister and Brother-in-Law … Together Apart” captures the couple on either end of a long bench. Though there is no estrangement implied, they are separated by the gutter between the canvases. They are both waiting for something, looking ahead, composed in thought, and not a bit discontent. They don’t need to speak. They are family.

“Parental Poncho,” by Kate Dodd.

This telepathic transmission between related minds is made literal in sculptor Kate Dodd’s “Parental Poncho.” What seems at first to be a polka-dotted piece of black-and-white outerwear turns out to be, on close inspection, woven from stiff coaster-sized plastic CAT scans of the brains of the artist’s mother and father. This neural net is sturdy-looking, but it’s also porous: no matter how tightly knit these consciousnesses are, the protective utility of their union is incomplete.

Dodd’s work is particularly clever because it undermines our expectations of what a family picture can be. The sculptor is showing us the most pivotal part of the human anatomy — the seat of her parents’ personalities — and reinforcing a sturdy link between partners in life. Yet once we realize what it is, we recoil a little: We don’t want to think about our brains any more than we have to, and we certainly don’t want to see our gray matter through a medical lens. Though the plastic discs are radically intimate, they are also anonymous. Brains are guarantors of individuality, but they are also unknowable, opaque, and maybe alien. Connections, it turns out, cannot be merely cerebral.

Although Dodd is not a satirist, she may be poking a bit of gentle fun at the scrapbook trend in contemporary art. There have been family trees and old Polaroids all over the galleries this year, and there are more than a few artfully arranged vintage snapshots and faded heirlooms on view in “Exploring Our Connections.” Nostalgia can make us reflect on our own ancestry, and that can be a valuable pursuit; sometimes, anyway. But unless the strangers we are shown are firmly attached — within the artwork — to a specific tradition or culture, their connections remain purely hypothetical to us. We can take the artist’s word for it as she pages through the family album, but it is hard to see the links as anything more than lines on a canvas.

“Heritage,” by Amber Koko Allen.

The better pieces in the show tether their human figures firmly to their surroundings. Amber Koko Allen’s “Heritage,” an exciting photograph, captures a pair of women in Caribbean clothing in front of a storm-weathered concrete building. Every detail of their dress links the island to West African traditions. We don’t know who these women are or what has compelled them to hold hands and tip their faces to catch the tropical sun, but we can situate them within global history.

Similarly, the plain-clad Puerto Rican man in Brandon Bravo’s oil painting “La Rogativa” sees the shadows of the members of a procession of Colonial Era stewards of the land on the seawall. They are, we realize, as real as he wants them to be.

The mixed-media artist Danielle Scott is a practiced hand at this sort of storytelling. “Tomas,” a boneshaker of a piece from a woman who has never censored her provocative impulses, draws a bright line across the Atlantic from Africa to the Antilles. She shows us a dark-skinned man holding a chain, head cocked to the side just enough to suggest a challenge, confronting us with our complicity in a monstrous act of violence, and reminding us that the ties that bind aren’t always metaphorical or welcome. Scott wants us to be astounded that humans were ever willing to strip other humans of their liberty. As she often does, she has tucked a genealogy into the bottom of her piece. It is her tiny way of reversing erasure of African-American experience and identity, and returning to those who suffered in bondage — many of whom were pulled away from their families — some measure of identity.

Scott’s work is a cautionary counterweight to the positive tone of the exhibition. Maintaining connections, it warns us, is not going to be easy. Corrosive forces are always at work on the links between us and our neighbors. Civil society isn’t going to be preserved without a constant struggle.

“Black Mirror,” by Kristin Künc.

Kristin Künc’s “Black Mirror” points the finger at one of the customary heavies: the hypnotic devices that, according to technophobes, are encouraging us to drop out of our obligations and stay inside instead. The classic 19th century interior space rendered in her oil painting has been invaded by the machines. A blank monitor crowds the lamp-decked surface of a handsome piece of antique furniture. Despite the lovely setting and the lure of the sunny day outside, the resident, who is going gray, has eyes only for the screen. It’s an old critique and not a particularly convincing one, but it is summed up so neatly here that it’s hard not to admire.

The plight of migrants isn’t as splashy a story as techno-dystopia. Our poor treatment of the dispossessed and homeless often happens out of view. Karen Cunningham centers it in a 32-page print zine called “The Invisibles: Sanctuary City” that she presents all at once in a single frame. Her street scenes are black-and-white outlines, but her migrants are shown in color. She is calling attention to those we sometimes look away from, arguing that we ignore them at great risk to our humanity.

The imperiled body recurs in “Mass of Neck IV,” a chronicle in gouache and ink of the cancer journey of transgender artist Ian King. Just as Scott incorporates pages of genealogies into her work to remind us who her subjects are, King adds hospital documentation to his desperate portrait to remind us where he has been.

“Community Wimple — Maker, Community, Land,” by Rachel Kanter.

Some of the most affecting pieces in the Arts Annual don’t contain bodies at all — at least not directly. In “Community Wimple — Maker, Community, Land,” Rachel Kanter invites us to imagine swaddling a baby in strips of gracefully composed cloth marked with geographical outlines, sewing patterns, doilies and fabric stitched with names of Jersey towns and businesses. Could this lesson in orientation and ordination in Jewish tradition possibly penetrate the developing mind in the crib? It couldn’t hurt to try.

Dan Fenelon constructs his own Celtic standing-stone, complete with tribal patterns, images from Irish-American history, and a fearsome, forked-tongue serpent rising, indomitable, from the stones. (See at top of this page)

Then there is Ellen Hanauer, who yokes three articles of clothing to a battery of bobbins on the floor. Her invisible, implied family is attached to the earth, to the wall, to New Jersey’s history as a textile center, and to each other by hundreds of connections. And from those links, they are being made.

As an encapsulation of the themes of this show, it is a bit literal. But when the message is this warm, and this welcoming, that is an easy thing to forgive.

“New Jersey Arts Annual: Exploring Our Connections,” which is sponsored by The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, will be at The Montclair Art Museum through Jan. 5. Visit montclairartmuseum.org.