The Unbearable Lightness of the Fantastical and Unwearable Art Show at The Terrarium Gallery at Drawing Rooms, 9/29/23 - 11/11/23

A Walk-Through of Constructed Identities in “The Unbearable Lightness of the Fantastical and Unwearable Art Show”
By Mona Brody
11/8/23

"The Unbearable Lightness of the Fantastical and Unwearable Art Show", curated by Anne Trauben, is showing in the Drawing Rooms Terrarium Gallery. The artists in this group exhibition have constructed identities in the form of installation, sculpture, photography, video, mixed media, drawing, painting, and sound. Trauben’s clear curatorial vision tells a broader story of archetypes, alter egos, historical referencing, and fantastical experiences for the viewer.

As I walked through the gallery, Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego, Mademoiselle Rrose Sélavy kept haunting me. Marcel Duchamp assumed the role of a seductive woman, displaying playfulness, fantasy, and the irony of Dadaism. His fellow artist and Dada collaborator, Man Ray, often photographed Duchamp’s adopted female persona dressed in a stylish 1920’s coat and hat.

Diamonds are a Queen's Best Friend by Christy E. O'Connor

A Dressing Room for Marie Antoinette, an installation by Christy E. O’Connor, achieved that transformative experience for me. The tiny white dressing room glowed in sparkling light, its scale suggestive of a child’s playhouse created an alternative world where Marie, in costume, danced to dream-like music in a video. I was transported into her fairytale of historical fiction and magic; I did not want to leave.

Changing Rooms by Bayard

Bayard, a multidisciplinary artist with a background in fashion design and costume, asks the participant to enter “Changing Rooms”, a 6’ x 9’ installation imbued with an abundance of multi-colored rags layered in this created space. The experience was reminiscent of an early 1900’s rag shop in the Lower East Side of New York. Was it a narrative of the people who might have given up tattered clothing for a fee? What was the real history behind the cloth?

Starlette by Poramit Thantapalit

Poramit Thantapalit’s figure appears with its outstretched wings, “a Phoenix” rising from the ashes. “Starlette” was created from recycled, corrugated cardboard composed of triangular cutouts,. uses staples to attach the triangular forms. This carefully assembled creature comes forward with a need for nature’s rebirth metaphorically and, literally, an imminent concern for sustainability.

Underpinnings #7 by Margery Amdur

Margery Amdur, a fiber artist, is a master at using the sewing machine. She has created a relief sculpture, “Underpinnings #7”, composed of vertical forms that are wrapped, stitched together, seemingly to protect. She brings to life through abstraction and repetition the need for human touch and support. I am reminded of a print by Henry Moore, “Tube Shelter, Perspective,”.This work was created during World War II in England; masses of people are huddled together sheltering from danger in an underground tunnel.

Are You Sure You Want to Be Mikey Mouse? by Miki Katagiri

Miki Katagiri, an expert milliner, using traditional hand craftsmanship to design, make, and trim, creates exquisite hats, but with a twist. Her hats are made from felt, fox fur, miniature toys, plants, and more; they cry out to protect nature, our environment, and pay attention to our universe. “Are You Sure You Want to Be Mikey Mouse?” is a satirical hat that has a toy meerkat sitting on fur, surrounded by Mickey Mouse ears, questioning life.

Caput by Kate Dodd

Kate Dodd’s imaginary headgear, “Caput”, is made from repurposed reference material. Keeping in mind its fragility, the work could easily be destroyed. The sculpture is meticulously assembled and painted with delicate colors resembling aged patinated metal. The materiality of the piece suggests vulnerability; curiously its structure suggests protection. The play of duality is what makes it compelling.

Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #7 (L) by Nina Katchadourian
Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #10 (R) by Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian, a photographer, videographer, and sound artist, takes witty self-portraits in which she portrays herself in a variety of ordinary settings. Utilitarian materials, such as toilet paper, which beautifully embellish the collar of her dress, and the mirror from the airplane’s bathroom are her immediate resources. These images are taken with her cell phone. “Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #10” is one such photograph. This fictionalized 17th century moody Dutch painting could have been a work created by Johannes Vermeer.

Braid Mask by gwen charles

gwen charles works in video, photography, sculpture, and performance. Like Nina Katchadourain, she uses her own body as an exploration of the female experience. Her photograph, “Braid Mask”, appears to emerge from a dream and historical referencing. Her evocative use of hair braids to cover parts of her face suggests fantasy and sexual promiscuity from a time gone by.

Mother by Donna Conklin King

The artist, Donna Conklin King, tells the story of a woman’s life lived. Her work on paper, “Mother”, begins with a worn shirtwaist dress from the 1970s. The dress is a matrix for a monoprint and mixed media; charcoal, an x-ray, and chalk pastel all beautifully drawn to express the portrayal of the fictional mother without arms or a face.

When an artist, with intention or not, creates an alter ego, what is the result? An artist may need distance from their artwork to provide clarity and a true understanding of the direction their art practice is taking. The artists in this exhibition designed a fictional framework as an essential part of their art, and when combined with its creator, the total proves to be a new and meaningful whole.

"The Unbearable Lightness of the Fantastical and Unwearable Art Show" will continue on view at Drawing Rooms Terrarium Gallery until November 11, 2023.

Mona Brody is an artist whose studio is at Manufacturers Village in East Orange, New Jersey. Learn more about Mona here.

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.

A Rag, A Bone, A Hank of Hair, 9/6/17 - 10/18/17, at Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery, NJCU

by Samantha Garcia, Reporter
The Gothic Times, The Official Student Newspaper of New Jersey City University
10/16/17

Caroline Burton

On October 3, the Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery in Hepburn Hall held an artist reception for Caroline Burton’s A Rag, A Bone, A Hank of Hair.  The gallery was filled with curious students, professors and visitors, as well as familiar admirers of her work.  The gallery was lit with amber lighting, which combined with the light of the setting sun cast the works in a golden, glow—an almost magical atmosphere.

Read the rest of the article here.