Articles By Tris McCall
Kirby & Delia: "All Rise"
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.
published on 07/09/2025
"Summer Mosaic"
Suddenly, the galleries in the Garden State are suffused with sunshine. The big ball of fire in the sky has gotten down to business, and curators have been keen to pick pieces that reflect the effects of the rising mercury. Galerie Lucida in Red Bank — a favorite among Jersey City artists — launched a summer-themed show. In McGinley Square, the curators at Crema assembled their own crew for a visual commentary on the warm months; Project Greenville mounted a group show dedicated to representations of parks and greenspace; Drawing Rooms switched on an aesthetic equivalent of lightbox therapy with an exhibition that celebrated the color yellow. Art spaces have become tanning mirrors, capturing light and refracting rays toward our retinas.
published on 07/02/2025
DS Special Projects
If you're looking for the place in Jersey City that is farthest from deep space, Hamilton Park would be that place. Everything about the neighborhood is intensely terrestrial. It's green, it's full of life, and it's the home of many people who are proximate to earthly power of one kind or another. Hamilton Park exudes a spirit of closeness, with street-level businesses and stoop-level life, the rest of the Downtown in walking distance, and New York City on the far side of the tunnel. Those who convene there do not seem like lost astronauts. There's too much at their fingertips for them to bother thinking about the void.
published on 06/25/2025
"Everyday People"
Portraits are paintings that look back. We know that the sitter doesn't actually see us, but part of us — the part that secretly believes in ghosts — suspects that there's an essence in the frame that is oriented outward. As anybody who has ever ventured into a family picture gallery could tell you, that can be uncomfortable. Art appreciators will sometimes say that the eyes of great portraits follow viewers around the room. They're less upfront about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Do they chase you like the admiring glances of a lover, or do they stick with you like a guilty conscience?
published on 06/18/2025
Eksioglu & Gross: "Tension & Tenderness"
All art is sequential. As long as we exist in time, we're condemned to see one picture after another and carry our associations from the first thing we see to the second, and third, and umpteenth. Though an artist can attempt to dictate the sequence, her authorial control is far from absolute. A cartoonist can guide us from frame to frame, but there's nothing to stop us from leaping to the punchline. A curator can ask us to navigate a conceptual mini-golf course, but we may putt right around the trickiest obstacles.
published on 06/11/2025
"Stick Around for Joy"
C.S. Lewis suggests that angels tell us to "fear not" because they are so fearsome. As corroborating evidence, he quotes scripture: the seraphim are described as massive creatures with great occlusive wings and bodies covered with eyes. To stand in the presence of one would be a terrifying thing. And it is by this sign that we may know them. Being not of this earth, the divine is not likely to be beautiful by earthly standards, and hey, what do we mortals know about celestial glory anyway?
published on 06/04/2025
Rene Saheb: "Stories, Transformed"
Rene Saheb keeps her garden well-watered. Her canvases and sculptures aren't wet to the touch, but they look like they could be. Drippings run down the surface of her acrylic paintings in bunches. Her sculptures, too, are plump and glistening, full of stacked sacks with pregnant curves and apertures that appear ready to pour something forth. Her colors, too, have the softness, transparency, and blurred quality of flower petals left to soak in a bowl overnight. She gives us undulations, folds, and rich thickness. A Rene Saheb scene always feels a bit like a glade right after a rainstorm: everything ripe and effulgent, with shadows in the mist, and growth happening so fast you could swear it's happening right before your eyes.
published on 05/28/2025
Nicholas D'Ornellas: "A Last Look"
Do you remember how it felt to leave an apartment behind? Do you remember your kitchen, once a font of life and nourishment, barren and stripped of your familiar possessions, naked, staring back at you, suddenly alien? What about your bedroom once you’d dragged the mattress away? Was there a permanent imprint on the floor like a photonegative? Or had every sign of you vanished? Did you search for traces and marks that proved your time there wasn't an illusion? Or did you turn the key one final time without a parting glance at where you’d been?
published on 05/21/2025
"The Devil Show"
The Devil is a thorny problem. Just by being around, he causes theological friction. If God is truly just, why does he allow the wicked Adversary to exist? If Satan is a free agent, capable of upsetting the divine plan, then God cannot be all-powerful. If the Devil is under God's control, but He is letting the tempter run around and corrupt souls, well, that’s not a very nice trick for the Big Guy to play on humanity, now, is it? Any way we look at it, the persistence of the Devil reflects poorly on God.
published on 05/14/2025
DISTORT: "Ending Up"
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.
published on 05/07/2025
Lori Perbeck: "Edge of Light"
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.
published on 04/30/2025
"That's Not Right"
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.
published on 04/23/2025
Dorie Dahlberg: "People I Used to Know"
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.
published on 04/16/2025
"Blind Spot"
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.
published on 04/09/2025
"Body of Work"
At the ART150 Gallery, the human figure continues its long and tortured comeback from its lockdown-era eclipse.
published on 04/02/2025
