Family Business

JDJ’s inaugural exhibition at its new Tribeca location is a celebration of itself. Coyly named “Family Business,” the show is a kind of friends-and-family-only preview of its program, something of an amuse-bouche for those who have yet to visit the first space just up the Hudson River in Garrison, New York. To wit: While Heather Guertin has a solo presentation on view upstate, one of her oil paintings is among the works on display in Lower Manhattan, drawing a spatio-temporal connection between the hubs.

But there are other threads that connect this web of artists, quite literally—several of them use fabric and tapestry as primary mediums. Noel W. Anderson creates digitally distorted renderings of found imagery, replicating the results on a jacquard loom. The artist’s subject matter tends to engage with the genesis of Black identities in the United States; likewise, riffing on the Rorschach inkblot, (hor)Rorshak (2021) incorporates basketball leather into a tapestry woven into a pattern mimicking that of a basketball shell, this being mirrored across either side of a diptych.

Found objects no less frequent “Family Business” in their physical forms. Athena LaTocha uses shredded tires, soil, and bricks to mar the outermost layers of her compositions. Fabricated with ink and shellac, her Untitled No. 22 (2015) buckles away from the surface on which it hangs. Daniel Giordano, influenced by the post-industrial landscape of his native Newburgh—which, too, resides on the Hudson—contributes Pleasure Pipe L (2019-2021) and Pleasure Pipe LVI (2020): Visually similar sculptures that jut from the wall in accordance with their namesake, the works’ phallic, pipe-like shapes derive from a hodgepodge of fine art materials as well as organic and synthetic oddities, from Murano glass and epoxy to Banksia pods and plastic wrap.