Safe-T-Gallery
will be celebrating the landscape of northern New Jersey this March
with an exhibition of startling and beautiful color photographs by
documentary photographer Tom Sullens. The results of thousands of
hours of walking, waiting and photographing along the transportation
and industrial arteries surrounding metropolitan New York, Sullens
brings a cold, clear, proletarian viewpoint to the often bewildering
array of industrial and natural wonders found just on the other side
of the Holland Tunnel. The exhibition will open on March 2, 2006
at 6 PM with a public reception for the artist, and will run through
April 1.
In the grand tradition of American landscape artists and photographers,
Sullens presents us with a series of wonders. The Pulaski Skyway, the
Bergen Arches, the Triples, West Interlock, Landfill 1-E, Point-No-Point,
the New Jersey Turnpike, these are the locations and sites that are
at the center of “Jersey Run.” North Jersey is dominated
by industrial sites, power generators, landfills, toxic waste sites
and prisons. It’s crossed by a network of railroads, highways,
movable bridges, tunnels, flight paths, runways, sea-lanes, and the
giant TEU yards. It is a place of power and radio transmission, pipelines
and antennae. In the air, under ground, on water and land, manufactured
products, food, commodities, waste and people are shipped, stored,
and moved again. It is a landscape that can draw a photographer in
deep. Sullens writes, “During a tour of duty comprised of perhaps
1800 shooting nights ... nailing pictures of Jersey was my job. There
I would plant a camera, stand ground, and if my timing was right, the
landscape might give up a shot.”
The resulting photographs are remarkably nuanced and complex.
The human work and skill that went into the construction and elaboration
of this
landscape becomes self-evident in these pictures, as does the seemingly
supra-human complexity that has resulted. Sullens’ technically
adroit imagery produces a series of poignant and tough meditations
on time, travel and the ambiguous nature of progress -- on a Jersey
run.
