Christine Romanell’s “Wide Ring Interlocken,” at right, is part of her “Navigating Infinity” exhibition at Hillside Square.
Outside of Hillside Square in Montclair, the visual provocateur Charlie Spademan has erected a sculpture of an anvil balanced, point-first, on the surface of a balloon. It is the only indication that there is something odd about the austere building at 8 Hillside Ave. — the design equivalent of a hot pink carnation pinned to a conservative business suit.
A steeple sharp as Spademan’s anvil suggests that Hillside Square was once a church. Indeed, before its comprehensive renovation by the Bravitas Group, it was the spiritual home of the town’s Christian Scientist community. Now, it is the headquarters of lawyers, psychiatrists, publicity firms and other commercial tenants drawn to the green retrofitting — and, perhaps, the lingering devotional vibes — of the former house of worship.
A trip inside clarifies things. Gray marble and beige stone give way to prismatic color. The first floor offices are filled with serious businesspeople, but the halls are in possession of an artist with a full paintbox: Christine Romanell, the big-hearted founder of the Garden State Art Weekend. Because images of her works reproduce so brilliantly — and because the cleverness of their design is easy to apprehend — Romanell’s sculptures have become some of the state’s most recognizable work.
“Mars Sucks,” by Christine Romanell.
Her three-dimensional portals and her arrays of concentric, brightly colored rings are ingratiating. They are also unmistakably hers. Once you see a Romanell, you will recognize a Romanell anywhere. The Bravitas Group hasn’t just handed the ground floor of their renovated church over to an artist. They have given it to a creator with an indelible visual signature and a prominent place in the New Jersey scene.
In other words, they want you to take Hillside Square seriously as an exhibition space — a place where artists can express complicated and powerful ideas. The pride they are taking in the work they have done on the building is apparent. Much like those in charge of the Silverman Building in Hudson County, they are interested in creating a distinctive and adventuresome sense of place, and for their current exhibition, they have enlisted the help of Romanell, whose art, easy on the eyes as it is, does not and could not resolve to background noise. As weird as it may seem to walk through the halls of a workplace that isn’t your own, that’s exactly what you’re invited to do. Hillside Square is open during business hours, which means that this gallery, or gallery-ish room, has one of the most generous schedules in North Jersey. It’s free art under the office lights, all day long.
“Navigating Infinity,” Romanell’s exhibition, isn’t the first strong show at Hillside Square. Other notable Jersey artists have exhibited work in the big central room and corridors of the renovated church, including the audacious Lisa Lackey, who has established herself as a textile visionary. But there has been nothing in the building quite as transformative as Romanell’s pieces, many of which seem to light up the space without the assistance of electricity. Romanell stacks progressively smaller rings of laser-cut plywood in towers that, as they reach out toward the viewer, resemble stars, or flowers, or the eyes of benign hurricanes.
By painting the tube-like centers of these rings a radically different color than the colors on the plywood that surrounds them, the sculptures look internally illuminated. Forcefully, and cheerfully, they pop out from the walls where they are hung. All of the hues Romanell chooses are kid’s-museum bold, and they are evenly applied in acrylic on each ring. Careful control of tone and shape makes these pieces as legible as an entry in a science fair, and as governed by physics and geometry as ripples on the surface of a still lake.
“A Bit Distracted,” by Katie Truk.
Color fields reoccur a few blocks to the south and east. “Macro vs. Micro” at Academy Square, another Bravitas restoration, is another play of overlapping shapes within 3-D sculptures hung on the walls. Yet Katie Truk’s vision is more chaotic, more turbulent and more voluptuous than Romanell’s scholastic rigor. A true Jersey original, Truk makes her art from swatches of pantyhose, which she sews together, attaches to thin cables, and then tugs, stretches and otherwise distorts in wire cages that themselves seem to be subject to tensile pressures.
Like Romanell’s sculptures, Truk’s pieces evoke objects from the outside world: cobwebs, sails, banderoles, kites in a stormy sky. They are also suggestive of the human body and what we cover it with — and the ways in which women’s clothing broadcasts malleability, adaptation, constraint and potential energy.
Just like the building at 8 Hillside Ave., Academy Square is a honeycomb of independent businesses including therapists, social workers and CBD entrepreneurs. It is also one of the headquarters of Studio Montclair, the city’s long-running arts advocacy nonprofit. “Macro vs. Micro” is a Studio Montclair show and, unlike the relatively contained “Navigating Infinity,” it spills out from the gallery and the atrium and continues down halls and up stairs. Some of the best pieces in this excellent, illuminating show are tucked away in the far corners of this renovated secretarial schoolhouse.
One, a wheel in black and white, is a study in tension: spokes made of pulled black pantyhose and a knot of tangled fabric in its center. It looks spring-loaded, bristling, ready to pop off the wall and roll down Bloomfield Avenue. On a nearby wall is an exercise in pink pantyhose squared, open tops pulled to four corners, the tubes for legs like open mouths, making a pretty Venus flytrap to fall into.
Best of all is a circular terrarium of earth brown pantyhose tied into riggings, a moss-colored substrate of fertile fiber, and four explosive blooms of white pantyhose flowers, bossy and lively as April crocuses. It’s not the sort of thing you would expect to see in an office building, but there it is, brash and weirdly beautiful, challenging you to think about women’s work wear and, perhaps, the nature of work itself.
A detail from “Regeneration,” by Sarah Canfield.
Both Academy Square and Hillside Square are on residential streets just south of Montclair’s main retail strip. They’re hard to miss. BrassWorks is different. It is technically on Grove Street, but it can’t be seen very clearly from the sidewalk. To get there, a pedestrian needs to navigate an ambiguous access road that looks like a holding area for an adjacent auto body shop.
Once inside, BrassWorks has many of the characteristics of a gallery, including appropriate lighting and big, wide walls that beg to accommodate paintings. It feels higher-tech than its sister Bravitas buildings — better suited for digital design than natural therapy — and in Sarah Canfield, they have found a painter who fits that attitude.
Like the Jersey City artist Pat Lay, Canfield is inspired by the byzantine interiors of computers and other electronic equipment. Sometimes she lays the mechanisms bare with precise renderings of diodes, wires and chip boards, and sometimes her images are smeared, psychedelic extrapolations of computer-dreams, rich with hot pinks and LED greens. In some of the larger pieces, big as a widescreen monitor, she tucks both of these modes of representation into the same frame: realistic renderings of electric innards on one side of the painting, and screen-warped distortions on the other.
“The Circuit Unseen” is as committed to velocity as any exhibition of still art could be. Everything seems to be changing around the painter, even as she is committing her vision to canvas.
“Machine Vision,” by Sarah Canfield.
One triptych — really a single image in three pieces — appears to be a motherboard seen through the bottom of a ribbed glass bowl. In another, pointedly dubbed “Machine Vision,” Canfield rips up panels, rearranges the shards so they protrude from the sides of the frames, and paints on the amalgam. The rows of dots and orange swirls could be a city in the midst of a radical transformation, or it could be a look inside the mainframe, with all circuits buzzing and internal lights blazing the way forward. The sides of those torn panels look sharp. If a computer is going to look back at us and move in our direction, Canfield seems to be saying (and perhaps warning), it will lead with its cutting edge.
It takes a painter of considerable skill to depict a computer chip and a nest of printer cables as they might look on the far side of a frosted glass. But in “The Circuit Unseen,” Canfield isn’t just showing off. She is engaged in an act of survival. She is trying to catch her balance, and maybe even her breath. There is fear here, and exhilaration, but very little rage against the machine: Canfield accepts this electro-blur as the state of things, and she is quick to concede its disorienting beauty.
“Hope Among the Reeds,” by Katie Truk.
Something similar might be said about Truk. Her wire boxes, decorated with stretch fabric and sliced-up dress-up clothing, are more wry observation than angry protest. As celebrations of female resilience under ferocious pressure, they are fitting for a former secretarial school — and a place where many women currently work.
As for Romanell, her concentric circle sculptures could easily hang in a science museum or a mathematics seminar. They seem to suggest deliberate cognition — they wear their thoughtful design on their colorful surfaces. These sculptures are not improvised; instead, they are built gear by gear. They are a celebration of an architectural way of thinking, and there is little doubt that they resonate for scrupulous renovators.
Montclair is, after all, a town known for brain work. The artists and curators at the Bravitas buildings are talking directly to those workers. They are telling them to hang on while the ground shakes beneath them, challenging them to think, encouraging them to keep the wheels spinning. As our world continues to accelerate toward a nebulous future, that’s not a bad message.
Christine Romanell’s “Navigating Infinity” will be at Hillside Square Gallery in Montclair through April 3. Katie Truk’s “Macro vs. Micro” will be at Academy Square Gallery in Montclair through March 21. Sarah Canfield’s “The Circuit Unseen” will be at BrassWorks Gallery in Montclair through April 26. Visit bravitas.com.
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