DISTORT: “Ending Up”
Just before you reach the entrance to the Journal Square station, you’ll see the train before the train. It’s a mural on the south side of an old apartment building on Summit Avenue. Its creator has, through a trick of perspective, made it look like a PATH tunnel has been cut out of the brick. A rail car in aerosol rushes toward us. Behind it are representations of the rock from which the tunnel was hewn, laborers with pickaxes, and a godlike figure whose garment seems to contain the primordial Jersey forest. At the bottom of the image is a modest tag: DISTORT. The artist has worked around architectural features, several metal poles and fixtures, and the rather undramatic proximity of a Dunkin Donuts to bring us this vision — one that neither glorifies or minimizes public works, but instead reminds us of their utility, their place in local history, and the sweat of those workers who sutured together the town.
Jersey City has produced a few exemplary muralists. Some are aerosol wizards; some are excellent portraitists; some are just good at going big and bold and bossy. Yet none gets closer to the narrative intensity of the Mexican masters Diego Garcia and David Alfaro Siqueiros than DISTORT does. His pieces are political without being didactic — they’re visual interventions in histories both local and national, and frank interrogations of the forces that have created the city we’re in. They ask: where do we think we’re going?
The allegorical depth of DISTORT’s work means that he doesn’t need to rely on scale to get over. In “Reaching for the Steal,” a strong 2020 show at Deep Space (77 Cornelison St.), he brought his vision indoors with a series of paintings that examined the explosive substances that have put a chemical charge in the American experiment: guns, sex, the police, industry, the coercive force of the state. “Ending Up,” a follow-up that arrives four and a half years later, isn’t quite so graphic. Yet the show, which’ll hang at the Art House Productions gallery (345 Marin Blvd.) until the first of June, is heavy with the uncertainty and bewilderment of our country’s (and our planet’s) recent history. It’s a more accomplished exhibition than its predecessor, more colorful, more gripping, sadder and weightier, full of pieces that are easily the equal of the murals that have made his name and his tag locally famous. If DISTORT’s voice has ever reached to you on the street, it will definitely speak to you indoors.
The artist makes the room crackle with his own peculiar energy. The five new paintings that Art House Productions curator Andrea McKenna has coaxed out of DISTORT aren’t building-sized, but they’re plenty big by the standard of modern galleries. Though they’re rendered in oil, his canvases lean toward the cotton-soft contours of aerosol. DISTORT’s lines are usually well-defined, but there’s a misty, milky quality to his skies, his canopies of trees, and his city streets. Then there are the characteristic DISTORT colors: bold, electric shades that Jersey City pedestrians know well. He loves to juxtapose sunset violet with ember orange and the green of budding plants in the spring. It’s all deliberately transportive — images of a city we feel like we know, but also one that’s been strategically defamiliarized to call our attention to its strange majesty and its troublesome fault lines.
Click here for the full review by Tris McCall on Eye Level