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.
