This must be the place: Budnick and Reyes welcome us home
How many animals are nesting in your vicinity? I don’t mean pets, necessarily, although you might have a few of those at your feet. I mean plushies, statuettes, depictions of critters, sketches and drawings of fauna charismatic and humble. Though we live in the city, many of us dwell by choice in private bestiaries. Even as we put up walls to keep the outdoors at bay, we invite representations of the feral world into our sanctuary.
Maybe we’re lonely. It could be that life with humans and humans only is more monotonous than we think it is. We may crave a little alterity.
In “Night Fish,” one of the many lively domestic scenes in “Your House & Mine” at Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison), a miniature safari roars from a kitchen table. Paper tigers stalk the corners, a tiny penguin figurine casts a long and heavy shadow, and pink pachyderms pop from a cylindrical mug. A flamingo sprints across the pages of a notepad. The top half of a bagel slants across the top of a daybook decorated with animal shapes. The cream cheese on the bottom half is an indication that hungry people are nearby. Though no humans are depicted, this place is enthusiastically occupied.
Kitchens of distinction: "Night Fish"
Those occupants are the painters and ceramicists Max Vesuvius Budnick and Francesca Reyes, who appear to see their home as a friendly intermediate zone between nature and civilization. The Reyes-Budnick house feels like a garden: warm, intermittently but lovingly tended, a little chaotic, a little overgrown and untamable, full of muted floral color and an understanding that seeds have been planted. Though the two artists never show their faces, they’re present in every frame through their attachments and the deep affection they’ve got for the wild and homemade things with which they share the house.
Some of them are flesh and blood. “Cleo” is without a doubt an image of a real cat, reclining next to a real fern, photosynthesizing beside a big window festooned with paper stars. The walls, however, are devoted to friends inorganic, including a flat purple moth with an alarmed expression and a large replica of a housefly. Atop the window ledge is a procession of plastic curios, including a dinosaur with its tail against a toy traffic cone (Budnick and Reyes love traffic cones). Outnumbered by creatures of clay, paper and paint, the feline and the fern stick together. The car key dangling from the back tire of a toy automobile is an adorable touch, but it’s also got narrative significance. Its presence lets you know that the people are home.
And the home — its perimeter, its personality — is on the artists’ minds. The Reyes-Budnick “Chalkboard,” partially erased and schoolhouse-smeared, is a psychic map of their place, with vines, blooms, stars, and crescent moons contained by the border of the blackboard. They’ve brought the outside inside, and, through the force of quotidian love, rendered it benign.
Soft as chalk: a painting rendered partially in charcoal to achieve that blackboard feel.
Notice the witch-shaped raycatcher next to a blurry landscape photograph, and a hamburger diagram on the wall just to the left of a miniature replica cow. On the chalkboard, flowers and mushrooms meet a scrawled shopping list recommending purchase of eggs, cat food (presumably for Cleo) and toilet paper. As on any happy home bulletin board, the mystical and profane don’t collide as much as they kiss and embrace. The artists bless the whole thing with a pair of monogrammed kids’ blocks: an F for Francisca and an M for Max, resting, casual but proprietary, atop a frame adorned with graffiti tags.
Adoration spreads out from the blackboard to the decorated walls and the staircase beyond, to the wallpaper, the wainscoting and the decorative molding, and the colored drapes and a rainbow basketball hoop with three painted birds hanging out on the backboard. Deep Space makes room in the show for a tableful of tiny wooden models of timeworn kitchen furniture, including a “Paint Stool” dotted with tiny blotches and worn at the legs, and a rickety yellow chair with one of its legs bandaged up like an old racehorse in a splint.
Putting its best foot forward: the yellow chair
Tiny celebrations of the particular ways life is lived keep tapping the viewer on the shoulder: a ceramic representation of a floral wallpaper pattern, a delicate rendering of rumpled throw pillows and a Chinese paper lantern, an image of three Cheese Doodles on a tiled surface. Reyes and Budnick have carefully thickened and dried their orange paint to mimic the granular exterior of a Doodle. One has been bitten in half.
But it’s the animal images that best express the spirit of “Your House & Mine,” and the Reyes-Budnick drive to catch fireflies in a jar and light their home by bioluminescence. With “Children and Their Art and a Snake,” a solo flight by Budnick, there aren’t any kids in sight, but there is a serpent, slender, yellow, and wide-eyed. The little reptile wraps itself in a single coil atop a sketchbook, which, in turn, rests on a sheet of wallpaper with a bucolic pattern.
The union of the snake: Children and their Art
The flowers, the birds, the trees, and the colorful ferns are framed and bound between covers, and the snake, guardian of wisdom, signals its intentions with markings that resemble candy hearts. These artists are bringing their own Eden home, and fitting it out with a benevolent tempter of their creation. Instead of exiling us from the garden, they’ve invited us in, on the understanding that we are wild things too — and wild things deserve a place of their own.
(Deep Space Gallery is often open on the weekends and always available to visit by appointment. Visit their Instagram page for announcements of special events. They've generally got something in the works.)
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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