McCall, Tris; Tris McCall’s First JC Fridays of 2020 Roundup, Jersey City Times, March 26, 2020
Excerpt from Jersey City Times article:
In theory, JC Fridays means free arts events of all types. The organizers of the festival promise music and live performance and film and poetry. That’s no fib: All of that stuff is on the calendar at jcfridays.com, which you should check out immediately.
But in practice, JC Fridays is a visual arts celebration and a quarterly echo of the annual Artist Studio Tour that has defined the cultural life in this town for decades. There are more art openings and gallery events listed on the JC Fridays site than all other options put together. This means it’s a fine excuse to run all over Jersey City, taking in as much visual art as you can stand.
“Commit to Memory” is the cry of the natural world sliding toward desolation; “Exquisite Logic” teases out the humanity lurking in the belly of the machine. Pat Lay’s clever work begins with an image of a computer processor or electronic component. From there, she mirrors it, colors it and manipulates it until it achieves spiritual overtones reminiscent of Asian devotional art. Lay calls some of the images in her show “digital mandalas,” and that’s not a misleading description. They’re meditations on symbols and patterns with long histories — symbols and patterns that follow humanity around no matter how deep into the technological murk we go.
The Pat Lay show marks the maiden voyage of the Dvora Pop-Up Gallery at the Oakman Condominiums in the Powerhouse Arts District. When the District ordinance passed many years ago, it was spaces like Dvora that advocates were envisioning — accessible street-level galleries with works visible to passerbys. For the moment, the pop-up is getting booked by people who were around Jersey City during the Arts District fight: Jim Pustorino and Anne Trauben of the Drawing Rooms space in Marion. (Yes, that’s the same Anne Trauben I wrote about earlier; Jersey City rewards tirelessness.) They know their history and have a sense of what’s at stake. The interior of Dvora is a bit raw, and industrial, too, but that suits Pat Lay’s computer dreams extremely well. From the sidewalk through the plate glass windows of the Dvora space, the works look like persian rugs designed by artificial intelligence. That’s a compliment. (6-8 p.m., at Dvora, 160 First St., drawingrooms.org/dvora-gallery).
