John Goodyear’s “Chicken and Egg.”
Paul Leibow’s “Silverstone TV” is one of the works that will be part of the show “The False Mirror: Surrealism Forward and Back,” on display at Artworks through Feb. 22.
“I notice in everything that surrounds us media wise — there are extraordinary influences from the historic surrealist period of the 1920s and ’30s. Today people accept them and don’t think of them in the way when first shown in art world,” says Frances Heinrich, who organized “The False Mirror: Surrealism Forward and Back,” on view at Artworks in Trenton through Sunday, Feb. 22.
Works in drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and installation by Tom Bendtsen (of Philadelphia), John Goodyear (Lambertville), Benjamin S. Jones (Beacon, New York), Alan Kesselhaut (Princeton), Paul Leibow (Leonia), Artworks director Lynn and Jim Lemyre (Mount Holly), Adam Niklewicz, Sarah Petruziello (South Orange), Frank Rivera (Hightstown), Anita Thacher (New York), and Andrew Wilkinson (Trenton) demonstrate “the ideas, sensibilities, and visual freedoms originally granted by historical surrealists and Dadaists,” said the Princeton-based Heinrich.
To give historical context to the “forward/back” idea, contemporary works are grouped near prints by surrealist masters. For example, Rene Magritte’s “Empire Of Light” (1950), a dark, nocturnal street scene set against an incongruous pastel-blue, light-drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds, hangs near works that deal with the subjectivity of time and light.
Benjamin Jones’ “Sunshine Policy” is, in the artist’s words, a “mash-up of architectural, animal and cultural imagery. As a visualization of an impossible scenario it evokes the sensibilities of surrealism.”
A four-legged outsized beast has landed atop a building in this sculptural work, with golden bolts emerging from the impact.
“It was created in a time of great flux in my life,” Jones said. “I began to notice a pattern of growth and decay in my surroundings that mirrored the sense of endings and beginnings in my personal life … the title comes from a sense of necessary optimism when faced with a bleak scenario.”
Heinrich has paired two works by Ernst with Jones’ sculpture: “The Fireside Angel” and “Celebs,” depicting grotesque sinister figures.
“Both incorporate animal imagery in fantastical alternate realities,” Heinrich said.
She has also paired works of Ernst with Frank Rivera’s Escher-like painting organized in a series of small panels. The images include gesturing hands, mechanical birds, puppets, chairs, and appliances performing in ways that are contrary to the laws of nature.
“The human eye is fascinated … by making connections between polar opposites,” Rivera wrote.
Ernst’s “The Hat Makes the Man,” a collage of hats cut from catalogs, is juxtaposed with Rivera’s “Reliable Plumage,” which shows different views of a man’s headdress.
John Goodyear, who identifies as neither avant-garde artist nor surrealist — two movements that happened nearly a century ago — might best be described as a conceptualist.
“The artist looks for an idea for a work rather than looking for technical expertise or finish,” he said. “Chance operation in the work moves away from beauty. Mistakes in the work were viewed as idea out of context and often led to important discoveries.”
Major influences for Goodyear were Marcel Duchamp and John Cage and, in later years, Leon Golub. His “Chicken and Egg” is a chicken made of eggshells and an egg made of chicken feathers. Heinrich has paired it with Magritte’s “The Mathematical Mind,” in which the mother has the head of a baby and the baby had the head of a mother.
Heinrich’s own “Worldly Fates” installation evokes Miss Havisham, the reclusive aged jilted-bride from Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel Great Expectations.
It incorporates juxtaposed incongruous imagery. A lit globe with human features and an antique hand-held table mirror serve as heads for an elaborately dressed bridal figure. Another bride, spread on the floor, has a deflated balloon for a head and is held captive by a ball and chain.
“The work explores self-awareness, approval-seeking, conforming, accommodation, rejection, abandonment, futility, failure, and deflation,” said Heinrich, who went to Douglass College on a full scholarship during the Fluxus movement.
Heinrich’s eyes were opened at Rutgers by Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Robert Watts, and Geoffrey Hendricks.
Heinrich has been interested in surrealism “for a long time.”
“There’s so much surrealism in movies: Avatar and Blade Runner, with its flying cars, is so surrealist, and we take it for granted today,” she said.
Her goal is to heighten awareness of the everyday uses in the media to the roots in art history.
“Life-size chickens playing badminton and other startling combinations capture attention. It’s a good hook for selling. People are now sending Christmas videos influenced by surrealism, underwater singing or children walking upside down on the ceiling. Do they know where it comes from? Probably not,” she said.
“The False Mirror: Surrealism Forward And Back,” Artworks Gallery, 19 Everett Alley, Trenton. Gallery hours are Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., through Sunday, Feb. 22.
More information is online at artworkstrenton.org, or call (609) 394-9436.
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