To tell the truth I feared the worst when I heard it was a Valentines show. Visions of Hallmark flew into my head with confectionery romance and red-cheeked, wing-clipped cupids shooting sharp little arrows into voluptuous hearts. While I saw no obvious cupids, the hearts I found were textured and strained in a array of art as varied as love, lacking almost any sense of cliched romance. It was a pleasant surprise.
Not that I liked everything I saw. Some things struck me oddly, though my opinion changed as I moved through the surviving collection. The more superficially attractive seemed to fade as I viewed piece after piece, while other works that leaped out less grew on me, bringing out depths of feeling in strange and sometimes disturbing ways.
After first wandering through the Community Gallery, I realized that there was few traditional views of love, but a tangle of emotional threads expressing themselves in shapes, shadowed colors and texture well beyond Hallmark sentimentality. Those images that had any saccharine overtones always seemed to have a deeper, darker, maybe even pained edge lying beneath their surface. Even those pieces that lacked this, seemed to be trying to say something more about love and sensuality than their medium could create. All the work seemed to be bursting from beyond the bounds of frame or canvas.
For this reason, the pieces that attracted me most used mixed media like glass and stone, drawing from the traditional only as a starting point to a more three-dimensional perspective.
The Community Gallery, at 111 First Street in Jersey City, is a temporary thing, according to one of the Love & Chaos organizers, Al Preciado. But he said shows like this were creating the need for a more permanent arrangement where artists and community come together. The Love and Chaos event, labelled prematurely “the first annual valentine art show” had been designed to attract my kind of folks, people who had always viewed arts as a rich person’s game, and who cringed over the potential spectacle of tuxedo and evening gowns. There was none of that here or perhaps reserved to the opening events a week or two after my attendance.
“We want to attract the individual buyer,” said Ahn Behrens, another organizer, whose intimate connection with Cooper Gallery made many of the exhibits possible. “We tried to present paintings men and women off the street can afford.”
She said they’d tried to set a ceiling on prices, and deliberately asked for smaller affordable pieces from the artists. While a few were above $150, many more hovered in a range between $75 to $100.
“We figured with smaller pieces we could afford to charge less,” Behrens said.
During her own tour of galleries, Behrens discovered inexpensive pieces among the more expensive. Most were small. Yet the idea for affordable art struck her.
“We encourage people to look at price lists,” she said. Few of the 103 artists seemed to mind, some actually submitting more than one piece to the show. Behrens said invitations had been sent to artists as far away as California, though most of the pieces came from artist in New Jersey and New York. Each was asked to create a work based on the theme of Love and Chaos.
Stenciled red hearts decorated everything from the sidewalk outside the block long warehouse building in which the gallery was contained to the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The building part of a business venture to provide working space for artists. The temporary community gallery was a grand advertisement to attract artists to these spaces. In walking the winding ways up into those spaces, I felt a sense of awe, the ghosts of past manufacturing suddenly turning in their graves at this new and innovative use for their place. I tried to imagine the tuxedos and evening gowns that had climbed the dusty stairs from the street, or swept through the wide white-walled hallways to where the paintings hung.
The opening weekend late last month drew a reported 300 people. One of the organizers for next week’s poetry reading ending the show, Rosette Capotorto, said she had come thinking it would be an intimate gathering.
“It turned out to be hundreds of people all dressed up,” Capotorto said. “And I came in my saturday night hang out clothing.”
The middle weekend, however, was much more relaxed. Many of the people came as much to see the film as the paintings. Project Images, which puts on film shows in Hoboken twice weekly, added a little spice to the weekend with Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.”
“I tried to pick something appropriate,” Geri Fallo, from Projected Images, said. She had also selected the film because it was not yet out on video, but fresh and controversial enough because of the dispute between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow to interest people. For those who missed the film, it was be re-shown at Live Tonight in Hoboken next week.
Organizers had tried to select events that would bring in people to look at the paintings. One weekend a movie. Another weekend poetry.
“People go to movies and poetry readings, but rarely art shows,” said Behrens.
For the poetry event closing the show, 20 readers will present their own word-images on the subject of love and chaos. Behrens called it “a sampler” like the chocolate kind lovers give their sweethearts in the more traditional celebration of Valentines Day. The doors will open for the event at 7 p.m. Saturday February 13. The show itself will end the following day.
Many of the paintings are already sold, red dots marking those claimed by previous viewers, blue dots marking those upon which a deposit has been place. One quarter of the show had been sold by the end of the first weekend.
“We even sold eight before the show officially opened,” Behrens said.
Part of the festivities will be Community Spirit Golden Valentine awards given to three people who the organizers believe really helped the arts. The design shows a golden dog with a red heart in its mouth, created by sculptor Al Preciado.
Kelly Griffin, Peter Bill and Diane Rolnick were also instrumental in putting the show on.