Autumn, Robyn Hitchcock told us, is your last chance. Things are wrapping up: the parties, the baseball season, the warm weather, the public beaches, the foliage cover. The days get shorter. The wind blows colder. An end is nigh.
But really, the fall isn’t the end of anything — not forever, anyway. Just as some plants and animals are fading, others are blooming. The days will grow long again. The next year will come hard on the heels of the year fading away. Maybe the really scary thing about the autumn isn’t the finality of the season. It’s the knowledge that, soon enough, we’ve got to do it all again.
“END World’s End” at Eonta Space (47 DeKalb Ave.) isn’t the most apocalyptic show you’ll see in Jersey City this year. It isn’t even the most fatalistic. But it is the most autumnal. Nothing overtly frightening happens in it, but there’s a Halloween chill running straight through the exhibition nevertheless. These works allude to things lost and unrecoverable — friends who’ve passed to the other side, old places in a Jersey City transformed, leaves that will never again be attached to a tree. But the three artists in this spooky group show are less interested in the moment of tragedy as they are in the aftermath. This isn’t a show about the rapture. It’s a show about residue: bedtime stories for the left behind.
Andrea McKenna’s haunted paintings exist in a curious stillness somewhere far beyond disaster. Her portraits in creek-bottom browns and clinic waiting room greens capture human beings who appear to be in the process of oxidation. Though McKenna stretches, corrodes, and burns her tapestries, the eyes of her spectral subjects still stare back from a netherworld. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that these are beings in the bardo — slipping without rancor between the world we know and the world to come. Their bodies are coming apart in streaks of pigment and drippings of paint. They’re receding into the ether, but their faces are intact.
Andrea McKenna
So we recall the departed: ancillary details slip into the mist of recollection until only the irreducible marks of character and personality remain. McKenna’s portraits are as much about us as they are about the ghosts of those we’ve lost. They’re gone; slipping away from the bonds of earthly existence and fading into the universal. To put a point on this (literally), McKenna inserts a twisted and leafless branch just below the chin of a torn wall-hung portrait. The winds have whipped this branch bare. It still reaches out to us like the parts of a fading memory that persist in our minds.
Bill Kennon is a dealer in mist, too. His shrouds our common possession: the City of Jersey City. His painted street scenes are redolent of October — autumn rain isn’t falling, but it might at any second, and there’s a bite in the air that might prompt a twilight walker to don a windbreaker. Kennon’s depopulated avenues, cloud-choked skies, and long vistas are the artistic revelation of the latter part of 2024, and I have to wonder why this evocative hasn’t shown more frequently in the town that he depicts so skillfully. Any painter with the chops to make the Newport Center Target sign look spooky is a visual archivist to reckon with
Kennon, it turns out, is adept at drawing out the hidden drama in objects and symbols that we’ve seen so often we take them for granted. A double triptych of a fence-lined street at night becomes an extended meditation on the two figures in the familiar school crossing sign. The images of the child leading the parent (or is the parent coercing the child?) come at different distances and varied angles, but always under distant streetlights and faintly illuminated autumn trees. Passing cars turn the pavement into a streak of pure radiance, and the long shadows of trunks score the sidewalks. Broken into six distinct pieces, the scene takes on the quality of experimental sequential art, and becomes a story told in segments by a restless narrator, looking over his shoulder.
Elsewhere, the lowering gloom falls harder. The courthouse is an inaccessible marble hulk hovering over the city like a great cage, its columns and darkened windows reflected in the slick surface of the roof of an adjacent building. A gigantic and strangely impassive skull hangs over a stand of scrubby trees on the urban periphery. Two cars on different trajectories are tucked under the blanket of night in an otherwise empty carpark; Kennon practically lets the blackness smother the scene. Then there’s that Target sign, partially occluded by a scrubby sunflower, hanging on even after the weather has abandoned it. Other scrawny boughs in the distance acquiesce to the season and bend back toward the earth. They lack the tensile strength of the tall streetlights, peering out like heavily browed eyes, and a single blank billboard, letterless against the pink sky.
McKenna’s gnarled branches and Kennon’s shrouded streets both imply that most Jersey sight: a torrent of fallen leaves, strewn everywhere and waiting for the rake. The downed fall foliage in “END World’s End” is supplied by the resourceful Anne Percoco, who provides the show with an installation that’s about as modular as it gets. The sculptor has collected scraps from the street and her yard — circulars, food wrappers, styrofoam, brown paper bags, menus, anything an uncaring motorist might fling out of the window of a car — and cut them into the shape of leaves. She’s scattered these liberally across the floor of Eonta Space, corner to corner, where they’re liable to get stuck on your shoes as you move about the gallery. Percoco and Eonta Space have even provided us with brooms and encouraged us to make like suburban landscapers with a house to get in order. A brutal storm swept through. We were shaken. But we weren’t blown away; we’re still here. We’re the survivors. And we’ve got a lot of sweeping up to do.
(“END World’s End” opens at EONTA Space on Friday, September 27 at 6 p.m.)
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