Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

I moved back to Jersey City from Park Slope Brooklyn almost a year and a half ago. I never really went out or socialized much in Jersey City; I do that in NYC instead. I consider Jersey City a transient town. I live here mainly because of it’s proximity to NYC and it’s relative affordability.

Recently, at the motivation of a friend, I started to check out Jersey City’s art scene. There are a number of galleries here and also a number of bars/lounges with wall space acting as galleries. I went to two different openings so far and I was surprised that there is an actual art scene here in Jersey City. Is it any good though?

Lets see:

Fruit 1

Fruit 2

Wall

Skeleton Woman

The above 4 images were from an opening at LITM. It’s a Bar/Restaurant by Grove Street that has frequent art shows as well. The show was quaint and the installation of the works was ultra crowded. It reminded me of late 19th century-early 20th century French Bistro/Cafe exhibitions of early modernist artists. These exhibitons literally displayed the work one on top of the other. You could not focus on any given piece and the work melted on the wall into one huge incomprehensible blob. The curator should have distilled the work a lot more and selected much fewer pieces. Am I asking for too much from a ‘Ma & Pa’ operation? maybe….

The second show seemed a bit more organized and thought out in the way the work was displayed. Ironically, the main display area was smaller then the first but the negative space between the art works was more prominent and thought out.

Take a look:

Bust

Fossil

Hunters

The pieces here are obviously sculptures. The fossil painting is neither a sculpture nor a painting, somewhere in between; a Fine Arts MO that you learn in Fine Arts 101 at any college!

The work was clean and some of it exuded a bit of thinking behind the aesthetics. I like the Hunters mini sculptures. They are elegant and reminded me of the Bushman of the Kalahari desert.

Concerning the gallery itself, it needed print materials, like postcards UPFRONT that describes the show, the theme, the artists, and the work. I didn’t see any of that. And if they had print material, it’s location was not visible or apparent. They also lacked any information about each pieces glued to the wall like artist’s name, materials used, dimensions, title, creation date…all of that was missing.

Jersey City has an ‘art scene’; albeit a scene that will always remain beneath the large shadows of its impressive neighbor; NYC.  Being under the shadows of Manhattan, the art scene in Jersey City suffers from an inferiority complex that even Freud may not have been able to cure. I wasn’t impressed!