Dead leaves and the dirty ground: Sawyer Conlon rocks
The very moment you step into the gallery, Sawyer Conlon hits you with a picture of a tombstone. He's fixed photographs of bare trees, each one with branches greyed by mist and suitable to star on the cover of a Norwegian black metal album, to the walls. Power lines subdivide grey skies, and scrub reed struggles up from the frosty ground. If that's not creepy enough, there's the soundtrack — warbly old music from the pre-jazz era, fitting for Jack Torrance at that Overlook Hotel party in 1921.
You’re thinking: I know what this is. It’s a horror show.
And you’d be right, sort of. “Overbrook” at SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.) does draw from the stylistic conventions of spooky cinema. But it’s much more indebted to Weird Jersey-ana: the creeping sense that there’s a strange and secret Underjersey tucked between the green aisles of the suburban towns. This combination of literature and guerrilla photography is calibrated to channel the Garden State uncanny.
Conlon’s narrative installation is set at the Overbrook Asylum, an infamous psychiatric hospital complex in bucolic Cedar Grove that was mostly shut down in the late 20th century and has been a magnet for ghost-dodging trespassers ever since. “Overbrook” is not an urban exploration exhibition: Conlon did not shimmy his way into the asylum and take shots of crumbling walls and medical residue. He’s an investigator nonetheless. Escape, for his main character, may be figurative rather than physical. He’s heading straight into the psychic abyss, but he’s doing it with his sense of wonder, and terror, intact.
Messages from the (inner) void: Sawyer Conlon's "12-16-1916"
Weird NJ devotees and Essex County ghost-watchers know, or believe they know, four things about Overbrook. This stark, engrossing little show, which will only hang at SMUSH until the 16th of the month, alludes to them all. First, the asylum was sprawling. A visitor could easily lose herself in its haunted halls. Second, in further overtones of The Shining, it was so cold in the rooms that patients actually froze to death. Third, the hospital was in the suburbs, right where the radios towers and brick buildings meet the first line of dense and spectral Jersey forest. Fourth (and this can’t be proven, but many people are sure it’s true) is that Overbrook is still home to phantoms — the specters of the thousands who died there — and if you’re nearby and you’ve got your antenna out, you’re liable to pick up some freaky transmissions.
Conlon believes it, or wants to believe it, and he keeps his aerial aloft as he journeys around the woods with his camera. He’s hoping to catch something numinous, and in many of these pictures, he does. He’s not afraid to literalize the chase for spiritual inspiration, in the remarkable “01-19-1917,” he outlines a baroque city clock in white, and connects its spire to the top of the print. Has it been struck by lightning, or is it transmitting etheric fire? Either way, this symbol of official record-keeping and supervision is alive and vibrant in a way that the winter trees are not. The photographer didn’t have to reverse the image to make his point. We all know that in psychological thrillers, the clocks run backwards, and in “Overbrook,” nothing is quite as ungovernable as time.
At the chime of a city clock: bare trees & the timepiece
The photographer does his best to tame it, or at least keep an eye on it. Every photo in this show is dated — generally in late autumn 1916 or the early days of 1917. That puts the point of narration disturbingly close to the period when neglected Overbrook patients caught their death by cold. A feeling of perpetual March hovers over the entire installation, and a snowy fog clouds windows, chokes the branches of trees, and blurs lines all over the show. Some of the pieces, like the shot of the imposing relay tower in “01-23-1917,” look damp with condensation.
Conlon’s habit of drawing shaky white lines on his greyscale images amplifies the sense of alterity. It often feels like he’s using his camera as an X-ray machine, exposing the skeletons of the objects he’s captured with diagnostic curiosity and more than a bit of fear. In “01-25-1917,” his lines guide the eye down a weathered corridor toward an aperture in the distance and a glimpse of a mist-smeared landscape. This is the way we’re headed: toward disintegration and the loss of our ego boundaries. We are caught and carried by the wind that takes us up and away and into a glowering sky.
Small cards posted in between the dates and shots add ominous flavor to the tale. So do pages from books and letters, all severely redacted in an effort to expose the story behind the story, or maybe just the deep structure that might be animating a mysterious world. The hand of an authority is suggested, but we never get to see the Overbrook doctors, or anything clinical at all.
Instead, Conlon keeps the focus on his main character. He invites us to sit at an old desk with an antique typewriter and peer at the contents in the drawers. We’re shown family pictures, keepsakes, handwritten letters; the residue of a life in progress. Should we turn to the left, we can leaf through a photo album. It all feels very natural: an ordinary station in the apartment of a troubled but ordinary person. But it’s so heavy with a feeling of absence that we find ourselves searching for clues. What, exactly, went on here? What pushed the occupant of this desk to Overbrook? Did he meet his doom there?
Paranoia... maybe.
Those who visited the ArtYard will be reminded of Lance Weiler’s “Where There’s Smoke,” a flame-touched installation that doubled as a domestic mystery. Weiler decorated the gallery with images of fires of unknown origins, gave visitors flashlights and headsets, and turned them loose on the reconstructed contents of his pyromaniac father’s closets. There were no definite answers in that show, either, but just as in “Overbrook,” the grim implications were unmistakable.
Though there are many galleries in Jersey City overseen by smart curators, it’s hard to imagine “Overbrook” happening anyplace but SMUSH. This intersection between guerrilla art, immersive installation, spooky images, and literature is exactly where this gallery lives — and it’s why it is one of the essential creative spaces in town. Gallerists Katelyn Halpern and Benedicto Figueroa have both mounted shows like that. Last year, Buttered Roll turned SMUSH into a Borges-inspired deconstruction of Simón Bolivar; the year before, Nocturnal Medicine converted the little room into an altar-choked temple to the earth in distress.
This is all intellectual stuff, but it’s also a hell of a lot of fun, and it’s amazing how many shapes this modest storefront on Summit Avenue has taken over the past few years. It’s been a staging ground for active historiography, a scene of interpersonal devastation, and a house of worship. For another week, it’ll be a conduit to a weird and chilly time and place in the history of New Jersey, an inhabitable photograph, and a tiny ballroom for dancing with ghosts. Then the wheel will spin, and they’ll switch it up again.
(Yes, you should go to SMUSH Gallery whenever you can. The programming can be freaky, but it’s never boring — not for a second. “Overbrook” will be viewable on Thursday and Friday at 6 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. There’s a suggested donation of $10-$20, and you can think of it as your contribution to keeping this innovative space alive and telling stories.)
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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