Morris Museum’s ‘New Sculpture/New Jersey’ is a rewarding overview

Valerie Huhn’s “Mirror Armor” is part of the “New Sculpture/New Jersey” show at The Morris Museum in Morris Township.

The New Jersey we know has been around for a while. Wherever in the state you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance that you are within minutes of a building, a bridge or a public works facility that is older than you are. Permanence of objects in the built landscape is something that we take for granted. We have fashioned our environment from stuff made to last: steel, concrete, plate glass, hardwood, rubber, plastic.

Many of our artists do the same. “New Sculpture/New Jersey,” a brawny and intermittently brilliant exhibition that will be at The Morris Museum through Feb. 2, is a group show where the heft isn’t merely conceptual. Curator Bryant Small has taken advantage of the spaciousness of the Museum’s special exhibition gallery by bringing in pieces that must have taken some muscle to move. The residue of industry is all over this show: heavy metal, chicken wire, graphite, acetate, pulled nylon and, in one remarkable instance, a mecha-creation consisting of mobile machinery. These all speak, sometimes eloquently and always passionately, about the constructed soul of the Garden State.

This is even true of the artists who take their cues from nature. Robert Koch, for instance, welds steel into shapes suggestive of organic lifeforms, including large discs that look like great sand dollars left on the beach after a molten tide. His “Pollen Sphere” is a steel seedpod as large as a tumbleweed; “Ferrous Couture II” an elegant wrap of metal, reminiscent, simultaneously, of a curl of birch bark and a fashionable dress. Koch’s treatment of his black steel gives his sculptures a glistening bioluminescence.

“Happy Roots” by Robert Lobe.

Small has put Koch’s works into dialogue — one that verges on a unison transmission — with the charismatic megaflora of Robert Lobe. The sculptor bangs aluminum sheets around trees and branches, takes their impressions and removes the casts, and reassembles the shells into replicas of living things. Walking through his section of the show is a stroll through a petrified forest. If a metal seedpod fell on a metal floor, might a metal sapling take root?

Elsewhere, other dynamic properties of metal are foregrounded. Philip A. Robinson Jr. drives dense blocks of wood into sheets of stainless steel in arrangements recognizable as the familiar attire of the famous. In “All Due Respect,” walnut and maple slabs become the robes and frilly collar of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Robinson encourages viewers to glimpse themselves in the gown of the jurist. But he is also inviting us to see our likeness, crisp as a reflection in an Oldsmobile hubcap, in chrome.

The mirrors return in the work of Valerie Huhn, who has fashioned a Kevlar-style vest from hundreds of postage stamp-sized reflective surfaces. She has draped the mirrored mail — with a single-colored fingerprint in the center of each little panel — around the torso of a hoodie-wearing half mannequin evocative of Trayvon Martin. The head in the hoodie is a hollow: a blank space for our imaginations to furnish. Like Robinson, she invites us to step outside of ourselves and inhabit the perspective and experience of someone with whom we might not easily identify.

Huhn’s investigations into identity and surveillance carry over to the gallery windows. There, she catches sunlight in sheets of clear acetate panels, each one festooned with thousands of glittering colored fingerprints — a rainbow-hued riposte to the black-and-white tone of police blotters. These interact with Christine Barney’s tinted glass blocks, stacked, Lincoln Logs-style, into towers and spirals. Barney’s translucent bricks, each about the size of a slightly melted stick of butter, refract and redirect illumination. In her hands, glass conceals as much as it reveals.

“Tri-Axis-Triad (Walker Turner Cubed)” by Joshua Knoblick.

Then there is the piece that “New Sculpture/New Jersey” will likely be remembered for. “Tri-Axis-Triad (Walker Turner Cubed)” is a hulking amalgamation of three vintage drill presses, each attached to a hub and a central motor and set spinning. Electricity has brought this old steel back to life, and as it rotates in place, it flashes ball-ends and rubber belts, spindles and whirring cylinders, loops of wire, and the arcane symbology of our industrial past. It’s part RoboCop, part fairground ride, and part altar to the lost gods of manufacturing, and it will be no great surprise to followers of New Jersey sculpture that it was assembled by Joshua Knoblick of Gardenship, the studio complex in the Kearny swamps where the fine arts and industrial arts have been encouraged to interbreed. Knoblick’s sculpture is powerful and formidable, but it doesn’t feel threatening; instead, it’s impassive, doing its duty according to its design, awaiting utility, like a big guard dog without an assignment. The whole thing exudes affection: for heavy metal, for machinery, for motion itself. “Tri-Axis-Triad” is a talkative monster, clicking and whirring suggestively as machines do when they’ve got something to say to us.

Small, forever probing for connections, juxtaposes Knoblick’s loading-dock reverie with a different kind of metal sculpture: Sunil Garg’s suspended latticework of wire. “Sleep Fragment” is hung so delicately and woven from such narrow strands of stainless steel that it appears to levitate. It could be the skeletal form of one of Koch’s metal beings, taken up by a breeze and flitting in the face of Knoblick’s grounded beast. Garg lights his wisp from below with a quartet of shifting LED lights so that each strand takes on a bright hue and becomes an electric curlicue in space, both capturing and reflecting illumination. It’s a callback to the play of light and color that animates Barney’s work, and another sneaky presentation of the secret rainbow that lies at the heart of this metal-heavy exhibition.

“September” by Katie Truk.

In this context, even more malleable stuff takes on tensile strength. Katie Truk stretches swatches of colored nylon and spandex pantyhose taut within three-dimensional wire boxes. Some are layered close to the wall; others are right up front, facing the viewer. In “September,” a rush of yellow banners, pulled on all four corners, comes flying forward. Other brightly colored shapes made of spandex hover in the background. It’s visually engrossing, but it’s also a testament to the toughness of pantyhose, an industrial product regularly put through the rigors of daily life.

Judi Tavill molds and fires tangles of clay, then scribbles all over them, making parts of her nests of rings and hoops as black as the nub of a lead pencil. “Emerge,” a loose white knot of ceramic strands, is cradled in the midst of a maelstrom of hooks, loops and dark cables of fired clay. The name of the piece aside, it’s hard to tell if the object is coming out or sinking in deeper.

Jamie Levine, an artist known for her ceramic replicas of rope, startles us with human-animal hybrids, including a bee with a human face, antennae where his eyes should be, diaphanous wings and a fuzzy torso, and little designer pumps at the ends of his six legs.

But no piece balances sturdiness and fragility as gracefully as Brian Gustafson’s glass umbrella does. Gustafson has been making and showing these exquisite glass parasols for a few years, and each one feels a little more protective, a little more winsome, a little more artfully translucent than the last. The material that the umbrellas is made from doesn’t look quite as sturdy as Barney’s prismatic bricks do, but they’re unlikely to shatter in the rain, and no gale could ever turn them inside out. One might even say that Gustafson’s protective device possesses industrial strength — and that industrial strength may indeed be a beautiful thing to possess.

“Bee Fabulous” by Jamie Levine.

One final word on this rewarding show: it leans very hard on Jersey City-based sculptors. Five of the 11 artists in the exhibition give a Jersey City address, and several others are deeply affiliated with Hudson County. Knoblick’s Gardenship landed right across the Hackensack River from MANA Contemporary — the enormous creative complex where Small maintains his studio.

I am from Jersey City, too, and I’m the first to crow about the creative and curatorial talents of the people from my hometown. But there is something perplexing about a Morris Township museum importing so much material from a city many miles from Morris County.

It’s not the first time that something like this has happened. The Morris Museum’s street art show, for instance, was dominated by artists affiliated with the Jersey City Mural Program. Small is shaping up to be one of the most intellectually agile curators in the state, and The Morris Museum is wise to give him room to showcase his vision. But a show that advertises itself as representative of the Garden State (“New Sculpture/New Jersey”) ought to till the whole garden.

The Morris Museum in Morris Township will show “New Sculpture/New Jersey” through Feb. 2; visit morrismuseum.org.