Hanging out with Jodi Gerbi and friends.
If all you need to see in a gallery show is an exhibition of superior painting skills, "Hope and Resilience" has got you covered. Jodi Gerbi can handle a brush as well as anybody in Hudson County can. The carnival hues of her oil painting, the drama of her modest-sized canvases, the balance in composition and interaction of light and shadow, her knack for suggesting the synthetic — all of this speaks to her confidence, her training, and her astonishing dexterity.
Gerbi, whose studio is in the basement of MANA Contemporary, leads Jersey City in double-takes prompted: she makes paintings that look like photographs until you spend a few moments staring at them. Then you realize that as skillfully rendered as they are, and as much specificity as she’s able to communicate, her pieces are aren’t photo-realist at all. Gerbi is up to something deeper and more fantastic than that. She’s using verisimilitude to activate memories, conjure complicated emotions, and play with your mind.
In a friendly way, mind you. Jodi Gerbi’s paintings radiate sympathy: for the disused, for the worn out and thrown out, and for the places where unwanted objects collect in sad, colorful heaps. “Hope and Resilience,” which will hang at IMUR Gallery (67 Greene St.) until the Ides of March, feels like a ward against carelessness and an entreaty to endure. Gerbi paints toys — junk-toys, the sort a lucky child might tease out of a claw machine on the Boardwalk for a couple of quarters and promptly forget about at the end of the beach weekend — and bestows upon them the sort of dignity and attention to detail we might expect from a family portrait.
In several of these fifteen pieces, Gerbi and IMUR curator Ivy Huang take us inside the toy birthing chamber, where plastic objects with painted faces lay at uncomfortable angles and in haphazard bunches, waiting to be picked up, adopted, and understood. Others explore the bitter end of a doll’s brief life-cycle. In “Still Life With Nutcracker,” the toy soldier is cast on his back among loosely tied blue plastic bags of refuse, upended soda bottles, and broken furniture. He looks very, very tired.
Crowded house: Jodi Gerbi's "The Keepers of Grace"
To get the full weight of Gerbi’s observations, it helps to be familiar with arcades, games of chance, and Shore amusement parks. But it isn’t strictly necessary. If you’ve ever seen a broken mannequin on the way to the dump and thought, even for a second, that’s me, you’re in the right frame of mind to dive into the ball-pit that Gerbi has made for you.
Boardwalk dolls and stuffed animals are heartbreaking because of how guilelessly happy they look. We know the brutality of their fate, and how often they’ll be forgotten and abused, tied to the front bumper of some smog-belching semi, or, even worse, never selected at all. “Before Everything” is a depiction of four fantasy stuffed animals, friendly pink dinosaurs hanging shoulder to shoulder with lavender unicorns at a carnival booth, symbols of unsullied innocence in a not-so-innocent place. It’s downhill from here for these guys. We know it, and we suspect they know it, too.
Ennobling trash is a Jersey art tradition. Our best creators treat it as a patriotic responsibility to see value where others cannot. Amanda Thackray retrieves plastic from the sea and fashions into weightless sculpture; Jerome China welds together pipes and rail ties into guardian spirits; Beth Achenbach photographs cans on the sidewalk and makes the crushed and dimpled surfaces shine like the facets of gemstones.
What distinguishes Jodi Gerbi is that the subjects of her paintings aren’t garbage yet. Instead, they’re incipient trash. They carry their obsolescence with them. At the same time, they’re visually assertive: brightly colored, action-posed, designed to draw and hold a child’s attention. In “Knowing,” a hot pink plastic pony with mascara-ed eyelashes flirts with the viewer from atop a pile of synthetic hair, upturned hooves, toy mice, and candy colors. It wants so badly to be liked, and effort has gone into making it likable. Nevertheless, its chances of escaping the bin that it swims in feel slim.
The fiddle and the drum: "Still Life With Nutcracker"
Gerbi’s sobering look at ephemerality is smart, but it wouldn’t go straight to the hearts of viewers if it wasn’t for her technique. The painter has a remarkable ability to capture the sleek textures of offhand manufacture and low-budget mass production. “The Lookout,” a virtuoso performance, is a tour of the gumball machine: there’s the faux-feathery sheen of the wings of the toy birds, the dinky, Smurf-blue plastic scales of the monster archer, the fur, already decaying a little of a chicken-shaped stuffed animal, the translucent, brittle trunk, so easy to snap!, of the glass elephant, and the dull sheen on the domed black and white head of the mechanical penguin. They’re crammed together, competing for scraps of attention, looking very breakable and all too forgettable.
Gerbi puts these objects right in your hand. You can feel the flimsiness of their fabrication, their tragic hollowness, the destiny of each to be lost in the dusty corner of a toy chest or chucked outright.
Yet they’ve also got faces — and faces change everything. Cheap though these playthings may be, they’re capable of locking eyes with the viewer. There are scores of artificial eyes in “Joyful Covenant,” dolls gazing back at all kinds of angles, upside down, peering at us from the side, tipping down toward the middle of the toy pit but staring in supplication, begging for rescue. Each has an attitude and a story.
In the witty “Euphoric Defiance,” a blue robot steps on the head of an orange one, and does it with an appearance of self-possession. The toy on the bottom looks utterly defeated. It’s a cheap boardwalk arcade version of one of those ancient sculptures of a Shinto deity trampling a serpent.
Dollmakers know that the flimsiest toys often elicit the most powerful emotional responses. They seem to ask us to care for them. It’s easier for us, insecure as we are for very good reasons, to project ourselves on to the ragtag and dispensable. Jodi Gerbi’s junky plastic buddies haven’t got much of a future. They don’t have much of a present, either. They strain to be adorable and dear, but so do their neighbors. They’re garish, goofy, superfluous, inessential; their wind-up gears may never be wound by friendly fingers.
“The Bunny’s Odyssey” finds a fuzzy but oddly threadbare mechanical animal in the corner of an overstuffed box. Should the rabbit take a step forward on its journey, it’s likely to fall straight into a pair of false teeth. Stand still, though, and it gathers dust and awaits the dumpster. Really, there’s nothing for the bunny to do but stagger on until the engine winds all the way down. Inorganic as it is, the painter feels its pain anyway — and that’s because it’s her pain, and, most likely, yours too.
(“Hope and Resilience” will be on view at IMUR Gallery until March 15. That’s Thursdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. It’s a free show.)
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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