Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Cosmic Love, 10/4/19 - 11/10/19, at Drawing Rooms

by Bruce Halpin
10/21/19





Cosmic Love, curated by Anne Trauben at Drawing Rooms, presents seven contemporary artists' consideration of the spiritual as it applies to their work. Spirituality is part of the artistic practice of nearly every culture. In fact, in many cultures it is the only subject of their artistic activity and is intrinsic to cultural production. Spirituality accompanies much of the discourse of Modernism from the Suprematists through Duchamp, Barnett Newman and beyond. The seven artists presented here each take a personal approach to the subject of the Spiritual.



Jill Scipione


Jill Scipione 

In the case of Jill Scipione, whose work is hung throughout the entrance hallway, as well as the entry gallery, the focus is on nature, specifically trees, as a repository of the divine. The woven bands, which comprise Ms. Scipione’s installation, had been previously tied around the trunks of trees which are slated to be cut down in Bayonne’s Morris Park. Ms. Scipione intends her work to serve both as elegy and a call to action to stop such unconsidered and unnecessary destruction of these quiet souls. It also serves as a rebuke to wanton and rapacious urban development. 



Sky Kim

Sky Kim’s complex and painstakingly executed watercolors reflect the meditative state in which they were created and are intended to promote a similar state in the viewer. They are beautiful in a profound way-their effect is part enchantment and part encounter with the sublime. They suggest a cosmos which serves to draw the viewer into a deep reflection on time and being. 




Bill Stamos

Like Ms. Kim, Bill Stamos’ investigation of the sublime is intended to impart a meditative state. It is, however, created spontaneously with a large degree of improvisation. Stamos’ keen sense of color and light is at the service of a transcendent beauty contained entirely in his work; his shamanistic approach to mark-making creates a coherent chaos. 



Mollie Thonneson

Mollie Thonneson’s “Poseidon Adventure” creates a submerged world of contemplation. Her installation, consisting of sewn together recycled lingerie and fabric remnants, is intended as an extended consideration of feminine sexuality. Through the formal exercise of color, design, and pattern, Ms. Thonneson imparts a sense of playfulness when combined with her titles, lending her work a subtle ironic humor. 




Maggie Ens

Maggie Ens’ large construct takes up an entire wall in gallery two and dominates the room. Detritus of post-industrial production is both medium and subject and is both an indictment of such, as well as a somewhat playful commentary. The installation threatens to overwhelm the viewer, but the humor displayed in her choice of components keeps it from being oppressive. A video opposite the installation shows the artist in the act of creating a similar installation. 


James Pustorino

James Pustorino’s drawing appears to be a diagram of some chaotic process which is on the quantum or cosmic scale. Mr. Pustorino’s title “Invisible Eye Overseeing the Sea” gives no clue to its subject and demonstrates a non-rational approach to mark-making. It’s like some Mad Professor’s drawing intended to explain the inexplicable, inviting the viewer down a, particularly colorful rabbit hole. 



Anne Trauben

Anne Trauben

This brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation to the work of Anne Trauben in gallery one. Composed of ceramic, paper and lights, her installation suggests a cosmos perhaps in the process of formation. Although presented as an installation, the artist intends each element as a discreet work and agreeable to any and all permutations. Ms. Trauben's work combines dynamism with an undeniable delicacy, thus instilling the viewer with a sense of awe combined with whimsey. In this work, the viewer's internal reality becomes interchangeable with external reality, a concept central to alchemy, as well as many other mystical traditions.


Cosmic Love continues through October 11 at Drawing Rooms 926 Newark Avenue Jersey City. The exhibit features drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and fiber art by artists Anne Trauben, Bill Stamos, James Pustorino, Jill Scipione, Maggie Ens, Mollie Thonneson and Sky Kim. Cosmic Love is curated by Anne Trauben.


Bruce Halpin is an artist living in Jersey City. Read Bruce's bio here and view his artwork here.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Cosmic Love, 10/4/19 - 11/10/19, at Drawing Rooms, published in Jersey City Times

by Tris McCall
10/18/19


Cosmic Love 3 by Bill Stamos

The shape of the cosmos is curved.  Its lines are soft, its dimensions are mutable, and its character is defiantly feminine. That’s the message — one of them, anyway — of the Cosmic Love show at Drawing Rooms in the Topps Industrial Building at the western tail end of Newark Avenue. Nothing about this uncommonly welcoming group exhibition feels rigid or cold: These seven artists might have their minds on the distant skies, but their collective version of space is nothing like a void.

And if that sounds a little hippie-ish to you, well, yes, Cosmic Love is as eager to embrace the viewer as any flower child might be. This is an exhibition that greets visitors with cloth vines bearing bright fiber blossoms. The piece grows out of the main space and penetrates the entry hall, and Jill Scipione, the fabricator of these flowers, does intend to get you knotted up and drawn toward the rest of the show. But the exhibition that waits within — one that covers a substantial amount of ground despite its modest size — isn’t particularly starry-eyed or blissed out. Many of these works radiate impermanence. As Douglas Adams (and countless physicists) assured us, the universe is a big, daunting, overwhelming place to navigate.

Two large works on paper by Bill Stamos grapple with this sense of immensity: Cosmic Love and Cosmic Love 3 greet the visitor to Drawing Rooms with twin slices of night sky. Technically, these are abstractions — colored streaks and constellations of glitter set against deep black backgrounds. Non-figurative though they may be, they definitely suggest astral phenomena; stare at them for a while, and they may lift you well beyond the roof of the factory.

Paintings from the deft brush of Sky Kim simultaneously evoke the grand and the microscopic. Her watercolors are so precisely rendered that they take on the meticulous quality of pen-and-ink drawings. Two works in her “Multiverse Series” hang on the southern wall of the main room — one may put you in mind of star charts, the other of furry, anemone-like undersea animals. Spheres, circles, and curves recur throughout the exhibit: Across from Kim’s illustrations of jeweled discs and hairy balls is a wall installation by Anne Trauben that includes clusters of round objects (including lightbulbs) in a steady and sinuous progression. Across from the Stamos pieces, a raft of Scipione’s cloth roses — the same kind that beckon visitors in the hallway — are arranged in a colorful clutch. It’s a humble, terrestrial counterpoint to the rest of the art in the show, and its tactility is a foretaste of the show’s wild, wigged-out centerpiece.

Untitled by Sky Kim

Save a colorful scrawl by Jim Pustorino in pencil and paint, the second of the two Drawing Rooms is devoted to fiber art. Mollie Thonneson‘s strips of fabric and torn and repurposed bras underscore the pervasive femininity of Cosmic Love — the sense of the universe as a kind of vast womb, dark, mysterious but ultimately self contained and nurturing — but these pieces are upstaged by GYPSY KOOMBYEYAH, a massive tangle of colored thread, wire, torn sheets, hula hoops, and hidden nests for found objects. (This includes Spiderman himself, who peers out from a perch within the web.) Maggie Ens, the creator of this installation, strung it high across the back wall, where it hangs like a net waiting to fall on the unwary. Like all of Ens’s work, it’s chaotic but deeply warm: It feels like a ball of yarn any curious cat could get pleasantly tangled in, and it rewards close engagement.

GYPSY KOOMBYEYAH is, indisputably, the Big Bang of this show.  But this star plays well with its supporting cast.  Ens’s view of the cosmos as a bright and bewildering net of associations and connections — one that contains joy and confusion in equal measure — one that’s shared in varying degrees by the other artists in Cosmic Love. The installation by Ens is big and bossy enough and contains enough fissile material to shine some golden light on everything else in the exhibition. These days, the cosmos is often imagined as an airless, unyielding place; this show is a pleasant reminder that it just might possess a beating heart.

Cosmic Love is on display until November 10th at Drawing Rooms, Topps Industrial Building, 926 Newark Ave, Thursday and Friday, 5-8p, Saturday and Sunday, 1-6p.

Tris McCall is a writer living in Jersey City. Read Tris's bio here.

Cosmic Love by Tris McCall for Jersey City Times October 18, 2019.