Face forward: Mikel Elam's Nocturnal Conversations
Jerome China breaks chains. That sounds like a metaphor, but it isn’t: China, a sculptor of brawny statues in iron and steel, often includes metal links in his work. Allusions to bondage, the middle passage, and resistance to oppression are hard to miss. Yet China is also drawn to the aesthetics of force. He likes applications of practical physics, and he’s sensitive to dramatic gestures. A shattered chain looks cool. It means something strong has met something stronger.
Signs of a titanic struggle were visible all over “Black’ity Black,” the emotional exhibition of abstract pieces by African American artists that Jerome China curated at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) in winter 2023. That show was nonfigurative, but it sure wasn’t noncombative. Almost exactly two years later, China returns with “I Said What I Said,” another bruiser fitted into a room distinguished by its brick-faced beauty. The art that China has brought with him isn’t all abstract, and the creators of these pieces aren’t all African American. Nevertheless, in tone, theme, and attitude, this show feels like a sequel.
To what can we attribute this continuity? It’s mostly down to China himself, whose tastes reflect a few strong preferences. He appreciates muscular expression: bold colors and thick lines that simultaneously suggest spontaneity and decisiveness. He responds to bursts of energy, loops, tangles, and vectors of motion. An undercurrent of defiance runs through his own work and the work he showcases. That which was fettered has broken free. It’s bruised and square-shouldered against adversity. It might be exhausted. But it’s on the loose.
It also demands a response from you. The pieces in “I Said What I Said,” in particular, aren’t content to simply hang on the wall: they’re here to give you a push. The human figures in Michelle Niefert’s “You Don’t Know Me But I’m Your Brother” challenge the viewer to identify with them, even as their clothing and their bearing marks them as foreign. One character, exhausted and ready to be carried, clings to the breast and the white robe of another who gazes back at us with dignity and quiet fury. Niefert amplifies the weariness of their faces by painting electric yellow squiggles over their features. Are they cracking?, coming apart under the enormous sun? How far have they walked, anyway? The large figure looks poised to hand the smaller one over to you. Maybe you’re ready to embrace your kin. Maybe you figure it’s somebody else’s problem.
In Gaza, or Central Asia, or Sudan, or a neighborhood near you: "You Don't Know Me but I'm Your Brother"
Three dramatic portraits by Kalan Mikeal press the issue further. The subject of “In the Shadow of Resolve“ is almost entirely obscured: his face and body are shrouded in black paint, and he is fraying at the corners. A red blotch over his heart is both a wound and a badge of honor. His shoulders are slumped, his hands dangle loosely at his sides, and his head is tipped forward; he’s gone a few rounds with life, and he has taken some shots on the chin. Nevertheless, he’s stepping from the blue toward us. We’re catching him in the last moment before he reveals himself to us. We are in the second before his arrival — before the beams light up his face, and we catch the full measure of the damage he’s taken and the resilience he’s shown.
Perhaps he’ll look like the character in “Shadows of Certainty,” composed of splotches of color and pigment-drippings, held together by the centrifugal force of pure determination. Better still is “Echoes of Resolve Through the Veil of Thought” (all of his titles sound like PM Dawn songs), a picture in profile of a man with his head tipped back and his bushy black beard interposed between him and his destination. He’s got his eyes closed, and the golden outline around his face makes it seem like he’s basking in the sun. Just as Niefert’s “Brother” alludes to images of the Madonna and Child, “Veil of Thought” echoes portraits of the saints — men and women who refuse to let outward difficulties derail their profound inward experiences.
"Shadows of Certainty" by Kalan Mikael
Mikeal’s subject is racially indeterminate, but his hair suggests African heritage. Niefert’s desperate pair could be wandering across a war zone in Gaza. These are people of color we’re looking at, and the resolve we witness here is that of people who’ve had to suffer deprivation and injustice.
The many human figures afloat in a sea of bright pigment in Mikel Elam’s “Nocturnal Conversations“ are immediately recognizable as nonwestern, too. One wears neck rings, another a regal headdress, and another, nearly naked, stares toward the horizon. Though they crowd the frame, they don’t seem to be conscious of each other. There’s a transcendent quality to all of them: they may appear to us side by side, but they exist on separate planes, inhabitants of related but separate fables, like holograms projected at different depths.Together, they’re a pantheon of protectors — not dissimilar to the sentinels that Nanette Carter recently summoned at the Montclair Art Museum.
The characters in “Nocturnal Conversations“ are as much symbols as they are beings. Antoinette Ellis-Williams, who is part of a group show alongside Jerome China now on view at HCCC, achieves her effects through the accretion of evocative things, too. Pages of books, sheet music, columns of numbers, adverts, dictionary definitions, upside-down and yellowing images of Frederick Douglass: they all get slapped together on a canvas, evened out, roughly coated with oil paint, and decorated with curlicues. “In the Beginning II,” an amalgam of bright fabric, thread, paper, prints, and pen filigree, evokes the homespun feel of a quilt, the aspirational significance of a ladder, and the arcane but carefully composed aesthetic of a computer motherboard.
These works aren’t naturalistic, but they aren’t exactly abstract, either. Even when these assemblies don’t look like anything on earth — as is the case with Ellis-Williams’s pieces — the materials that they’re made of carry immediate meaning. You could call them collages, but that wouldn’t get at it, either. Elam’s characters feel like they’ve been brought together by geological or astrological forces, and his canvases are the end result of centuries of tectonic shifts in the signification of cultural artifacts. The same might be said of the curator’s own sculptures made of old chains, cages, keys, and railroad spikes. Jerome China may hold the blowtorch, but history is the welder.
Alas, there are no works by China in “I Said What I Said.” But the show does contain a man after his own heart, and his own practice: metal provocateur Jorge Luis Rodriguez, who contributes a quartet of his box-sized sculptures to the show. These stare down from a central gallery like lethal clocks, counting meticulous time for the rest of the show. “Sadikifa,” a pinwheel of gleaming steel triangles affixed to cylindrical dowels, could be a fan detached from a menacing engine. It’s at rest — for now. Cleverly, gallerists Anne Novado and Eleazar Sanchez put these pieces in dialogue with Dan Campbell’s bristling knots of car parts, wires, cables and belts, each one balled up and leering like automotive taxidermy from across the room. It’s the mechanical versus the mythological, though it can be tough to figure out which one is which.
Candy colored car crash: Dan Campbell
If you’ve been in Hudson County galleries, you’ve seen pieces like Campbell’s: junk, locally sourced and artfully arranged in spectacular heaps. Jack Henry has pieces that fit that description at the Majestic Condominiums right now. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen industrial waste painted such cheerful, flamboyant colors, or kissed quite as passionately by the rainbow. This is the extra flavor we’ve come to expect from a Jerome China show: vibrancy, passion, inversion of expectation, well-what-do-you-think-of-that impertinence. Even the nonfigurative pieces in “I Said What I Said” carry narrative dynamism.
Well, some of them, anyway. Al Santana’s “Bright Moments” feel like a sedate outlier in a show that mostly pushes the viewer. His acrylic paintings on birchwood (much of this show is done in acrylic, bucking the local oil paint preference) are winsome, and full of beautifully bent fields of textured and blended pigment, but they don’t demand a response or an interpretation like much of the rest of this exhibition does. Closer to the program is the wall-ful of supersaturated color prints, bestowed with abstract images and the glossiest surfaces the artist can manage, by the imaginative Phoebe Tree.
Then there’s Diane English, who fashions a band of radiant alcohol ink in melting yellows, reds, and blues across a sheet of Yupo paper. Amidst the clouds of color, she’s placed objects that look like a little like checkboxes and a little like polyhedral dice in mid-roll. She calls it “Tumbling.” You won’t have to wonder what direction they’re coming. They’re coming straight at you.
(The Novado Gallery is open Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. “I Said What I Said” will be on view until April 18.)
Al Santan
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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