A dreaded sunny day: Orestes Gonzalez at the cemetery gates.
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.
And sometimes it’s pretty clear he wants to be known, but he can’t find a safe path out of the gloaming. “Blind Spot,” a group photography show at MORA (80 Grand St.) is a study in occlusion: a seventeen-artist dodge in which the camera never seems to catch anybody straight on. For reasons deliberate and accidental, subjects are hidden, or partially hidden, or engaged in a complex negotiation with daylight. Even the green giant in the harbor, who, in saner times, is clear as a skyscraper, is obscured. In Stephanie Guillen’s “Liberty Confused,” the Statue stands behind a shimmering blur and is encircled and bound by a rope of electric light. Her latitude for action is limited, and we cannot see the Lady’s eyes.
This is the third in a trilogy of early spring shows that highlight the relationship between anonymity and revelation — people-centered exhibitions in which we never get a good look at people’s faces. Their postures, on the other hand, speak clearly about their feelings of transience. Sarah Mueller’s portraits at Art House Productions radiated mystery. The human figures in the “Body of Work” group exhibition at ART150 (another show with a beleaguered Statue of Liberty in it) felt burdened with their own ambiguity. “Blind Spot,” curated by Tina Maneca and Joseph Shneberg, continues to explore that strange combination of safety and destabilization that accompanies anonymity.
As it does, it makes a few points about what masks are and how they work. The best ones don’t cover our features entirely: they emphasize certain details about our faces and personalities while suppressing others. Even as they provide a shield for the shy to duck, they create conditions for their wearers to interact with society on their own terms.
In the margins, the subjects of these photographs are free to surprise themselves with who they are. Amy Neufeld shows us a familiar face — Jersey City curator Bryant Small — in the guise of a horned devil, pocket watch in hand, counting off the seconds in “Tick Tock.” Polish photographer Mateusz Swiderski contributes a flirty shot of a lipsticked man peeking out, cautiously, from behind a turquoise veil. More provocative still is Łukasz Zdęba’s “Portret W Czasie Natalia LL.” The photographer has fitted his sitter with a gas mask and snapped her on an antique sofa on a parquet floor. Its upholstery envelops her, and bestows a queer sort of dignity to her actions, as she inhales the contents of a metal canister.
Shadows and half light: Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal's "The Conversation."
Other masks are makeshift. French artist Cornè Theron shoots her models through a window made of thick glass squares. Her “Echo-Chamber” photographs split these faces into segments and mimic the effects of extreme pixellation. We know there’s a person behind the panel, and we can even catch some of the details of her appearance. But the color of her skin, eyes, hair, and lips have been converted to swatches through the mediation of the material she’s tucked behind. Not invisible but practically anonymous, she advances masked. So does the subject of “Veiled,” a black and white shot of a woman in mourning dress — or something like it — by Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal. The tassels that hang around her chin droop and gleam like the strings of beads that she clutches. Her headwear becomes the physical manifestation of a prayer. Adorned with objects of the spirit, she faces the day.
In curator Shneberg’s “No Passengers,” the PATH Train becomes a mask. Its dark windows are smudged mirrors for riders waiting on the platform. A man is visible to us on the far side of the train; we see his shoulder, his thick neck, and a squared, close-shaved jaw. The top of his head is blocked by a thick black bar. This lurker is inscrutable, but as the American flag slides by against the stainless steel of the train car, there’s a sense he’s watching us.
Old Glory returns in “Elmo,” an incisive bit of street photography from Jersey City’s own Zach Mayo. An entertainer in a muppet suit is bathed in the too-hot light of an electrified Stars and Stripes in Times Square. Logos and messages are everywhere: the Hard Rock Cafe, Harry Potter, the Paramount Theater, the NYPD, fast food, a sign from a resting protester reminding us that Hitler was an elected leader. Elmo, himself a kind of trademark, stands engulfed in illumination, furry hands clasped in front of himself, ready to greet passersby and welcome them into the heat of commerce.
Tickle me: "Elmo."
And what of the person inside the Elmo suit? Must that person completely garb himself in someone else’s intellectual property in order to withstand the intensity of consumer capitalism? The muppet sends us mixed messages: its shoulders are tense, but its carriage is erect and its fuzzy head is looking upward. However he’s feeling, he’s armored and untraceable. He’s disappeared into the character in the same way that the edges of the suit dissolves into the blazing light of the big flag.
But the best, cleverest way for a person to establish an anonymous presence is to resolve to shadow. Everyone respects shadows. Everybody, to be frank, is a little scared of them. Though they have no mass, they certainly carry significance. They’re a portent of things to come, and a whisper of things that have gone away. A well-placed shadow is something like an ambulatory blind spot: a tiny eclipse.
There’s nobody in the cemetery in Orestes Gonzalez’s showstopping color print “The Citi Never Sleeps,” but the shadows of hundreds of crosses on the snowy ground testify to the presence of something awake under the ground. In the face of death, the whole picture shivers with implied life. The Virgin Mary casts a shadow of her own on a wall with chipping white paint in Seth Philip Greenwald’s “Man Reading Newspaper, Venice,” and it beckons the reader to take his head out of the worldly and reorient his attention to the transcendent. Like his accompanying contribution “Men Walking, Lower Manhattan,” it looks like a still from a classic ‘60s film.
And what about Grant Hardeway, theorist of absence and presence? He’s the show’s biggest dabbler in shadow magic. “The Ego Has Landed” is a human shadow erect, but thin and fragile next to a larger one of unknown provenance. In “Self-Revelation,” a small human figure on a Journal Square alleyway casts a shadow so long, the frame can’t contain it. In both photographs, the shadow is a distortion — a projection that misleads us abut the dimensions of the person casting it, and, simultaneously, an expression of something essential and irreducible about that person. After all, no one can cast your shadow but you.
The central figure in “Anonymity Isn’t Invisibility” is a man who doubles as a shadow: we’re shown his hat, his necklace, his shirt, and his steel-rimmed glasses, but the rest of his body has disappeared. It blends seamlessly with the black background of the print. What look at first like details of his face turn out to be, on closer inspection, tricks of the imagination.
Yet we can tell a few things about this ghost from its relaxed posture, the homespun nature of his clothing and its hints of Caribbean ethnicity, and the way in which he occupies space. He’s not projecting his personality, and he’s not leaving too many clues about who, or what, he is. Nevertheless, he’s here, hidden and right in front of you, standing, Cheshire-like, on the borderline between what is and what isn’t. He might remain in the safety of the blind spot. He may ask for your cooperation or dare you, silently, to fill in the blank spaces. Or, emboldened by what he has learned in the shadows, he may cast ambiguity aside and step in to the light.
(The MORA Museum of International Art — formerly known as the Museum of Russian Art and the CASE Museum of Russian Art in Exile — is open on Saturday from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon until 4 p.m.)
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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