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Showing art results: From 11 to 21


DISTORT: "Ending Up"

by Tris McCall
published 2025-05-07

Just before you reach the entrance to the Journal Square station, you'll see the train before the train. It's a mural on the south side of an old apartment building on Summit Avenue. Its creator has, through a trick of perspective, made it look like a PATH tunnel has been cut out of the brick. A rail car in aerosol rushes toward us. Behind it are representations of the rock from which the tunnel was hewn, laborers with pickaxes, and a godlike figure whose garment seems to contain the primordial Jersey forest. At the bottom of the image is a modest tag: DISTORT. The artist has worked around architectural features, several metal poles and fixtures, and the rather undramatic proximity of a Dunkin Donuts to bring us this vision — one that neither glorifies or minimizes public works, but instead reminds us of their utility, their place in local history, and the sweat of those workers who sutured together the town.




 

Lori Perbeck: "Edge of Light"

by Tris McCall
published 2025-04-30

Ours is a town receptive to strange photographs. Artists and viewers still operate under the twin signs of Edward Fausty and Shandor Hassan, former residents of 111 First Street and audacious image-makers, city-scapers, and saturators of our fields of vision. Dorie Dahlberg, Frank Hanavan, and Grant Hardeway have all demonstrated how much urban storytelling they can coax out of an odd picture. Then there's Susan Evans Grove, an experimentalist unabashed, who finds constellations in the pockmarked hulls of ships, and, through tricks of illumination and shadow, turns arrangements of cosmetics bottles into post-apocalyptic skylines. Grove's hallucinations teach us something important about light: under the direction of a skilled illusionist, it obscures as much as it shows.



"That's Not Right"

by Tris McCall
published 2025-04-23

Art fairs, I have learned, are a little bit like the senior prom. They might not be your idea of a good time. But you don't want to be stuck at home while everybody else is on the dancefloor. Even if you don't party, it's still nice to be asked.



Dorie Dahlberg: "People I Used to Know"

by Tris McCall
published 2025-04-16

Maybe you’ve got a friend who won't stop texting old photographs to you. I do. At any moment, I am one glance away from an uncomfortable saunter down Memory Lane. Gentle suggestions that he ought to reorient his attentions to the future haven't deterred him. The shots of me at younger, spryer, healthier ages can be tough to take. But for sheer destabilization, they've got nothing on the pictures of acquaintances I once had but forgot about entirely, or the pictures of people I'll never see again. Those can be a midday stomach punch: a reminder of the frailty of memory and the transience of all things.



"Blind Spot"

by Tris McCall
published 2025-04-09

Anonymity, the Jersey City photographer Grant Hardeway tells us, isn't invisibility. That may be so. But anonymity isn't presence, either — not entirely. The anonymous person dwells somewhere between here and not-quite-here. He stands on the cusp of recognition. Sometimes he gets awfully comfortable in the shadows.
















 

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