Dots and loops: Norm Kirby and Anthony Delia have their day in court
The murals in the Brennan Courthouse (583 Newark Avenue) aren’t tough to decipher. There are pilgrims, there are patriots, and there is Hudson County history rendered in the boldest strokes. Look to the underside of the building’s grand dome and you’ll find signs of the Zodiac; look to the walls for “The Coming of the English,” a piece by Howard Pyle that depicts exactly what its title suggests that it will. This feels appropriate for the town’s most handsome building — one with an interior reminiscent of classic civic architecture in Trenton and D.C. and the decorated Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and named after a jurist whose written decisions on the Supreme Court were distinguished by their clarity. William Brennan believed in the salutary effects of direct and comprehensible language. For him, the law was no place for abstraction.
But on the ground floor of the Courthouse, abstraction reigns, and will for the next three days. “All Rise,” a show of colorful drawings by the artists Norm Kirby and Anthony “CP Harrik” Delia, is full of pieces that refuse to foreclose interpretation. Their nonrepresentational collaborative works on paper are occasionally reminiscent of city ward maps marked by circuitous bicycle routes. One looks like a blooming grove seen from above. Another is not dissimilar to the chambers and capillaries of the human heart. They capture a certain type of energy that’s presently on the loose in city art spaces: gentle but restless, spontaneous, flexible, deliberately indeterminate, suggestive of human language but, on closer inspection, quite reticent.
Sign on the dotted line
For Kirby, who is one of the most visible artists in Jersey City even if many of those who are familiar with his work don’t know his name, this is a change in approach. His outdoor pieces depict actual things: bodies in motion, buildings, bicycles, monsters, recognizable symbols, words in script. The chain-link fences he’s decorated with knots and strips of ribbon continue to speak to us, even as the rough fabric he’s run through the spaces between the steel wire has weathered and yellowed. In a city under construction, he’s worked with the materials circumstance has provided. Developers have been his unwitting collaborators in the hardest kind of woven textile art the Garden State has ever seen. Delia’s work isn’t an indispensable part of the city’s visual signature in the same way that Kirby’s transformed chain link fences are, but it’s recognizable in its own right — especially his thatches of marks that suggest human faces and figures, and his thin hearts made of hundreds of colored streaks.
The two artists bring that characteristic looseness of line to a place as tidy as the Courthouse. It feels subversive. In a house made of words, Kirby and Delia import a cursive script of their own devising — one that feints toward text but establishes its own architecture of meaning. Many of the artists’ marks look like characters from an alphabet, committed to paper quickly, maybe surreptitiously, a flicked-wrist transmission characterized by emotional urgency. In their “All Rise” series of pieces, Kirby and Delia score discrete fields of watercolor and acrylic with crossed vectors, swirls, undulations, and lines that noodle around, bend, suture together shapes, and wind their way above and beneath neighboring scrawls. These threads can be impressively long, and following them around the frame can prompt a viewer to do some serious eye-acrobatics. They dare you to disentangle them and make them make sense.
Clouds and characters from Kirby and Delia
They’re not the only ones playing this game. This spring and summer, art distinguished by marks that resemble script has been visible in galleries all over the Garden State. The furious scratch, the tally-mark, the vigorous jotting, the secret alphabet, the doodle that coalesces into a rune: all of these imply a writer with a tremulous hand, a human being recording his impressions in a private language that only he can read. “All Rise” is the fullest realization of the trend. That it comes in a historic courthouse dedicated to the memory of a powerful and plainspoken disciple of the English language might be an accident, but it doesn’t feel that way. In practice, it’s more like a vote of no confidence. At a time of unprecedented instability, words as we know them aren’t getting the job done. Courts — the place where words are directed against problems and layered, brick by brick, to create bulwarks against injustice — aren’t easing anybody’s minds, or staying anyone’s nervous hand.
Hence, the most electrifying contributions to “All Rise” are the ones where the wordless writing simply never seems to stop. In a highly energized piece, the artists apply swirling lines in pink, crimson, purple and blue to a silver background, and lace a continuous black ribbon over the whole thing. These paths go on and on in one fluid motion, from corner to corner, mimicking the shape of longhand letters, but never giving up their secrets. It’s as if the artist must continue twirling and spiraling around the frame, loath to lift the brush or let go of the thread. The loops and bends cross each other, pirouette, double and triple back, and dangle like untied shoelaces. There is writing, and there is overwriting, and there are lines as buried as those on the base level of a palimpsest. Yet this work is not chaotic. Instead, it has a strict internal balance and a logical apportionment of color and energy. The symbols, signs, and characters implied by these lines may not add up to anything traditionally legible, but they’re presented by the artists as if they do.
Black lightning at the Brennan Courthouse
If we could read it, what would it say? What anxiety do these marks express?, what is all this pathfinding and straphanging directed toward? The more placid pieces in “All Rise” give us a hint. In one of the most lyrical, a wreath of ovals in purple, coral, pink and maroon encircle a blank space in the middle of the page. No two are pitched at the same angle, yet they manage to sing in a funny sort of harmony anyway. It’s a fall of flower petals, with each watercolor field tickling the next. To the more juridical-minded in the chambers on the floors above, this image might hint at disorder. But it’s hard not to call it anything other than beautiful. And maybe, during days like these, that’s message enough.
(The Brennan Courthouse is open weekdays from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. You'll have to go through a metal detector to visit the rotunda, but it my experience, they're very nice about it, and they truly want you to see the art. They'll also encourage you to visit the murals on the fourth floor. They're proud of their building, as they've got every reason to be.)
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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