Judgment of the moon and stars: two panels of Gürbüz Dogan Eksioglu's "Night's Dream"
All art is sequential. As long as we exist in time, we're condemned to see one picture after another and carry our associations from the first thing we see to the second, and third, and umpteenth. Though an artist can attempt to dictate the sequence, her authorial control is far from absolute. A cartoonist can guide us from frame to frame, but there's nothing to stop us from leaping to the punchline. A curator can ask us to navigate a conceptual mini-golf course, but we may putt right around the trickiest obstacles.
This presents a storytelling artist with a challenge. Her intended meaning might depend on the order in which we receive her images. Short of binding them and compelling us to turn pages, there are limits to what she can do to compel us to accept the sequence that she considers optimal. Multimedia artist Cheryl Gross actually did write and illustrate a book, and attached her drawings of an imaginary race of radically evolved humans to a work of speculative fiction. At her recent Mana Contemporary solo show, Gross set her post-gender Umons free from linear plot, lifting them from the press and assembling them on the gallery walls to be accessed as visitors pleased. Nevertheless, she made sure to show us the book, under a vitrine and open to a relevant illustration. We could get it, read it, and sort these characters properly.
I got it and I read it, and I’m glad I did. Cheryl Gross is very funny, she’s a sure hand with retrospective narration, and she makes her appreciation of H.G. Wells evident with a trip to a Dr. Moreau-style horror island seemingly modeled on Dachau. I also appreciated The Z Factor for its insights into Gross’s particular take on sequentiality. Gross’s creations never want to stand alone. They’re designed to attach to something: a tale, or a concept, or a controversy, or another Cheryl Gross drawing, or whatever happens to be placed next to one of her pieces. In good faith, and with good humor, she’s always prompting us to turn the page.
Though The Z Factor can be read as an intervention in debates over habitat destruction, gender ambiguity, and Holocaust remembrance, she’s not by nature a polemical artist. Instead, she’s driven by a desire to reach out — one expressed through her bold choices of color, her vigorous crosshatched infill, and the quotes she embeds in her pictures. Gross’s pieces come out swinging wherever they’re placed, even in a room as busy, and loaded with visual information, as DGA Gallery was during “Anonymous Was a Woman.”
This quality makes Gross a rewarding artist to exhibit. Regardless of the opinionated tone of her pieces, her hunger to connect makes her a crowd-pleaser. The latest room to show her off is IMUR (67 Greene St.), the rare Jersey gallery with an international perspective. In “Tension & Tenderness,” curator Ivy Huang has paired Gross with the Turkish illustrator Gürbüz Dogan Eksioglu, an artist whose work displays similar immediacy, even if his execution is quite a bit calmer. Like Gross, Eksioglu leans toward sequentiality even when he presents his pieces one at a time. Part of the fun of “Tension & Tenderness” is seeing how artworks made on opposite sides of the Atlantic bond to each other like paper and glue.
Huang has hung Gross’s magisterial “Tiger,” a big cat too energetic to be easily contained by its frame, next to “Fontana’s Assistant,” a minimalist Eksioglu illustration of a black housecat beneath a slashed-up painting. The Turkish illustrator is making a sly reference to Lucio Fontana, the fine artist who upended gallery conventions by lacerating his canvases. Cats like to scratch, too, and the self-possession with which this feline assailant is walking away from the frame suggests culpability. If this little perpetrator could tear at the air with its teeth and leave red splatters of striped ink as it rips apart the day the way Grace tiger can, it certainly would. Instead, it compensates for its smallness with its grace, and it leaves its own ferocious mark.
The skill to survive: Cheryl Gross's big cat
The five works on the Gallery’s first floor feel like incidental storytelling, too. Right between the IMUR windows, Huang has placed a Gross piece unlike any of those we’re used to seeing: an oil painting of an “Old Fish” in rendered in dark shades of pelagic green and stoplight amber, bent at an unnatural angle, with its mouth hanging open in an expression of astonishment. Has it, to its surprise and lack of comprehension, been yanked out of the ocean? Or is it simply cruising and writhing at a depth beyond our understanding?
Its predicament is echoed in “Bottle Fish,” a more familiar Gross design, rendered explosively in ink, crayon, ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and stains and spills from the artist’s coffee cup. Here, a scaly customer is encased in a plastic container. As a reader of The Z Factor would know, this is a comment on the anthropocene, and the way in which human carelessness and cruelty has made life difficult for our nonhuman neighbors. But the fish is also a symbol for the unconscious, and emotions present but suppressed. Gross’s animals are frequently confined, pinned down by circumstance and the limits of depiction, trapped in a too-tight predicament and desperate to wriggle free. The fish, like the artist, has a signal for us — that’s why the bubbles stream beyond the twist-off cap. It’s become a message in a bottle, searching for a friendly shore.
Sending out an S.O.S.: the "Bottle Fish"
Gürbüz Dogan Eksioglu’s pieces have none of the visual restlessness and vectors of energy that characterize Gross’s work. Instead, the artist favors the flat fields of color without gradients and clear, bold, unbroken lines of storybook illustration. Yet he, too, gives us pictures meant to draw our attention to other pictures. “Night’s Dream I,” “II,” and “III” constitute a triptych of pigment prints on paper that could be stills from an animated short. In the first, a goldfish in the cup of a flower with the faint trace of a smile looks up at a crescent moon in a starry sky. In the second, the moon has become still, and the fish continues to make ripples on the surface of its small floral bath, like an idea begging to be expressed. By the third, the fish has become the moon — and the moon shines from the middle of the flower. The message: our aspirations, no matter how improbable, may well be realized in the fullness of time.
This is an optimistic vision, and since we read from left to right, it feels like a conclusion to a story begun by Gross on the east wall and finished by Eksioglu on the west. The fish has escaped the bottle and transcended its period of confinement. Perhaps it has had to die and go to lunar heaven to do it, but something radiant has been left in the wake of its tiny life.
If Cheryl Gross had gotten the last word, it might have been a different sort of story — less placid, more querulous, more ambivalent. The Z Factor has its triumphant moments, but at the end of the book, the struggle for meaning for those born different is just beginning. “Light Pollution,” a highlight of “Tension and Tenderness,” is a six-panel example of Gross’s accordion books: pen and ink drawings arranged on a series of wooden boards held together by metal hinges. This one follows a lightbulb-headed creature, tenuously plugged in, with a skeletal body made of jagged sprockets. By panel five, he’s dancing atop tenements; by number six, he’s receding into the clouds. (It’s a bit like one of those medieval pieces where Jesus appears several times, at different depths, working different wonders.)
The are beams and cones of illumination on each page, but many of them are blocked by blotches of color, or by the gutters between installments in the story, or by the smoke and checkerboard ribbons that curl across the tops of the images. There may be no simple resolution, but there is a trajectory. Like all Cheryl Gross pieces, it points, furiously, outward.
The man with the lightbulb head: Cheryl Gross's accordion
Its incendiary spirit is complemented by “Hope I” and “II,” another brief piece of sequential art from Gürbüz Dogan Eksioglu. In the first print, he shows us an unlit matchstick, standing upright in a field and sprouting branches like a tree. In its followup, the tip of the match has been burnt to charcoal and bent by the flame. The ground that the match stands on has grown paler, the horizon seems more distant, and some of the leaves have burned away. Yet four of the sprouts are spared the flame. Their leaves remain intact. No matter the trauma we’ve suffered, and no matter how desolate we feel, something is still growing. The “Hope” illustrations are a complete thought, but they also beg for a sequel. Will these little shoots flourish? Can they ever compensate for what has been lost?
Casual match in a very dry field: "Hope I"
“Hi to Peace,” a new illustration of a dove with an olive branch on the lip of an abyss doesn’t give any answers, but it does provide some clues. The sky behind the bird is a small patch of pure blue; the pit is wide and tar-black, and stretches to fill the corners of the frame. The little avian messenger is alone, and from the tentative way in which its tiny talons grip the edge of the hole and the faraway look in its eyes, we know it’s taken some courage for it to land in such a precarious spot. Cleverly, Eksioglu situates the viewer in the darkness. We’re looking up at the dove, but it seems awfully far. Perhaps we can reach up and accept the gift that we’ve been offered, and in so doing, climb out of the dreadful predicament we’ve found ourselves in. To find out, we’ll just have to wait for the next illustration.
(There’ll be an opening reception for “Tension & Tenderness” at IMUR at 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 14. The gallery is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. Also, on Wednesday, June 11, Cheryl Gross will give an artist talk at Mana Contemporary — 888 Newark Ave. — at 6 p.m. It’s moderated by the editorial cartoonist and visual satirist Steve Brodner.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
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