Death and Life in Jersey City

The calling cards, homemade organic whole wheat fig bars and the journey to and from are some of the most memorable parts of last night.

Melissa McAlpin’s little brown envelopes with a replica in miniature of one of her hand-drawn images tucked inside hint at the sweet sadness of her sister's story. The lovely round coaster printed with a lemon so yellow it makes me pucker just looking at it, once flipped over reveals Amanda Thackray’s work described in an ancient yet futuristic language, the piece signed and numbered; a work of art in itself – printed at Sesame Letterpress in Brooklyn. And my friend, Maya Joseph-Goteiner’s modern interpretation of an almost obsolete item: the paper library catalog card, printed on heavy water-color board in courier font as though hand-typed on the Corona in her installation on war in literature.

These give-aways accompany the artwork at last night’s opening of WWIII: A Wonder Women Project presented by _gaia and hosted by the Mana Fine Arts Exhibition Space* in Jersey City, NJ. Calling-card art in miniature, and yours for the taking, now through April 12th.

The whitewashed cinderblock walls and gray cement floor of the gallery seemed perfectly fitting to both the neighborhood immediately outside the large steel doors as well as to the theme of the show, which examines the artists’ understanding of and relationship to war. Ten women were chosen to participate in a residency at _gaia in Hoboken. Over the course of six-weeks, they talked, wrote, shared and executed creative projects related to the theme of war. This collection, organized and curated by Joanna White (whom I know from my time at ICP) and Doris Cacoilo, shows the inconsistency of its participants - for some, it seems to be a summary of an experience, for others a work in progress.

My journey to the show begins at the World Trade Center site NJ PATH terminal in lower Manhattan, an appropriate jumping-off point given that for so many in America, the war most affecting our lives exploded here on this soil. For me, the Iraq War started in the White House, with our dependence upon oil, and with our arming of Saddam Hussein decades ago when the US government assisted in hoisting him to power before toppling him after 9/11. Political beliefs notwithstanding, I experience the symbolic depth of this place that when peering down into the p;it it feels as though I am looking half a mile into the core of the earth and into what has gone wrong in our world.

The bright white taut canvas canopy and swaying flags herald the entrance to the terminal, in contrast with the basement-like station at the bottom of the escalators. Cement, leaking pipes and an abundance of harsh fluorescent lighting overhead and on booms could confuse a visitor into believing they've walked into movie sound set where an interrogation scene is about to take place. Surrounded by chain-linked fencing and views of the monstrously large excavation of what was once skyscrapers foreshadow the war-zone to come in Jersey. Like the gallery, the WTC PATH terminal feels clean but harsh – like an emergency room operating out of a mammoth garage. Cold, intense, sterile -- but not in the sense that when you drop your brie and grapes on the floor, as I will later do at the gallery, you would still want to eat them, unless you’re in the midst of a war zone and some food off the floor is the least of your worries.

After a less than 10-minute train ride, I exit at Grove Street in Jersey and am greeted by a moist-wind-swept plaza (it’s only a short distance to the shore with rear-facing views of the Statue of Liberty). Using the Dunkin-Donuts as a marker, I am told to go left down its street, which is Newark Avenue. Starbucks is opening on the plaza as well: a sign that Jersey City has either arrived or has gone to hell, depending whom you talk to.

Turning right onto Coles, walking through a neighborhood that seems to change with each of the twelve blocks I walk, a mix of rundown and renovated, single family clapboard and elegant brownstones, divey bars and more upscale restaurants, clearly a neighborhood in the process of the big bad word: gentrification. Just as Coles seems to Dead End, a handwritten sign beckons the traveler through a construction site under an overpass that ushers autos in and out of the City via the Lincoln Tunnel. Oh, so this is where we are. I’ve seen this neighborhood from a car window thinking it looked like it was either decaying or just being built. Now that I’m on the ground, walking through broken pavement, mounds of dirt, around piles of beams in the almost opaque darkness of evening, I realize that both observations are true: Jersey City is dying one death and coming to new life simultaneously. In that way, gentrification could be thought of like Easter for a neighborhood. Hmmm. If only we could all believe in its promises of development as resurrection. Starbucks doesn’t feel good in my own neighborhood of Jackson Heights, which just this morning I noticed has opened in amidst the bodegas and Colombian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, El Salvadoran and Italian restaurants. But, I digress.

Following more hand-written signs “this way, don’t be scared!” illuminated by the blue light of my mobile phone, I stumble over one last bit of debris (or was that the start of a sidewalk?) into the exhibition space. It’s large enough to comfortably hold the ten installations as well as at least one hundred people without feeling cramped or hot. There’s none of that standing on tiptoes or brushing past and subtly nudging others to get closer to a display card to read what the work is about. And this is one of those shows where you want to read what the artist intends if, like me, you like to know those sorts of things. I’ll take a first impression, stand back (which there was also room to do) get up close, think about it, feel it, but, ultimately I don’t want to walk away scratching my head, which would have been the case with a number of these less-than-straightforward pieces.

Take the lemon-coaster woman’s work, as example. Amanda Thackray set-up plywood boards with a tree’s worth of lemons attached by electrical wire that then connects to a pulley running though a yellow-painted bicycle suspended from the ceiling and from which hangs a cinder block over a plate with more lemons. Next to the plate of lemons, on a table lined with a delicately embroidered cloth and above which hangs more old school looking needle-point works of lemons as though you've just entered your grandmother’s kitchen in Europe, limoncello-spiked lemonade is being served out of a glass decanter. Huh? I don’t get it. After reading Thackray’s statement – the one in English, not the one in Esperanto, the constructed “universal language” meant to foster peace and understanding across cultures – I understand that her intention is for me to consider the power of the lemon: its acidity can, in this fantastic creation, manufacture sufficient power to crush other lemons so that I can drink the lemon nectar. Come the apocalypse, lemons can kill themselves to nourish me. Oh, okay. I get it now. I think.

Another artist hung a traditional wood medicine cabinet on the wall and on the rung below an army-green hand towel that reads “look inside.” Swinging the door open, which is lined on the inside with a mirror, shows a video projection of a green hill, the number 3009 on a large sign and row upon row of white crosses. Above the video stands a shelf filled with prescription pill bottles, face creams and toiletries. The common, everyday items we see and use juxtaposed with the death of soldiers that has become all too-common in our lives and the lives of people around the world. On the day in January when the film was shot in Lafayette, CA, 3009 Americans had lost their lives in Iraq. Today on public radio I heard that as we approach the five-year anniversary of this war we’ve lost over 3,700 American lives and anywhere from 40,000 to 100.000 Iraqis.

The exhibition also includes a video accompanied by sand spread on the floor (I didn’t read the description on that one…), portraits of Protestant and Catholic women organizing for peace in Northern Island accompanied by the artist’s journal of the same; a discombobulated map hand drawn and mis-assembled; homage to the water crisis fueled, in part, by the unnecessary dependence in first world countries on plastic bottled water, 1/5th of which does not get recycled; a wedding dress fashioned out of 400 used dryer sheets; and a woman promoting a candidate for the presidency who doesn’t exist except in her imagination. Or, at least, I think that’s her shtick. I have to admit, I’m already so sick of the presidential campaign that I couldn’t bring myself to get close enough to her table of leaflets and buttons and “Die Harder,” a play on the Bruce Willis movie, posters to really understand. Fortunately, the food table beckoned only a few steps away so I bee-lined in that direction.

One of the more impressive, elegant yet profound works is Melissa McCalpin’s Phone Call, in which she relates the story of how her sister, a marine serving in Iraq, lost a close friend when his helicopter was shot down. In a quilt of three-dimensional boxes on the wall laid out in a 9 by 4 grid, McCalpin succinctly tells her sister’s story in word and drawing. Each group of sentences is framed and flush with the wall; on either side, the accompanying squares further frame the sentences raised just an inch or so from the wall. Pinned only at the top, McCalpin's transparent tracing paper sketches flutter as if a feather falling from the sky – or a man rappelling from a helicopter. She has carefully tinted the drawings wiithin a palette of perhaps three colors. McCalpin is, perhaps, making order out of the chaos of her sister’s experience, juxtaposing the solidity of the facts of the story, "In scarves and hats they mingle learning how to smoke cigarettes" with the tragic whimsy of the illustrated details like the image of the soldier's arms or the naive teenager's boom box - a young man who today plays Man on the street corner and could be recruited a year or two from now to serve and die on the streets of Baghdad. The work provides a powerful juxtaposition both in content and mood.

My dear friend, Maya Joseph-Goteiner, prepared a room whose walls are books with war in their title, perhaps two hundred of the more than 20,000 titles ever published in English. You will find the classics like Tolstoy's War and Peace as well as little known titles translated from other languages at the turn of the 20th Century. War Library is lit by brass lamps that remind me of the New York Public Library, with over-sized and plush green pillows for sitting in the center, Joseph-Goteiner invites us into the space to reflect in silence or in discussion on our understanding of war. Stacks of blank manila card catologue index cards call for reflection; clothespins hang longingly on invisible wire suspended from the ceiling, waiting for cards to fill in as wall paper and, as the wires are decorated with cards, the library’s walls increase in height.

Nine o’clock arrives quickly, and the host switches the lights on and off to signal that opening night is coming to a close. Eight friends head out into the soft drizzle to brave the war zone underpass as a battalion looking for a dry, warm place and a cold beer. After a quick stop at Maya and Mike’s apartment on fourth, we slip past a few drunk, heavyset men into one of those dive bars just blocks from where Starbucks is due to open. After paprika fries and Guinness, shouting over and singing with Ozzie, Thoroughgood and AC/DC blasting from the juke box, I feel resurrected and grateful to be able to push thoughts of war to the back of my psyche for another night.


* Artist Talk and Closing– April 12th 4-9pm
Gallery Hours M-F 10-6 pm or by appointment
Mana Fine Arts Exhibition Space, 227 Coles Street, Jersey City, NJ 07310 (800) 330-9659White