Liberty Science Center in Jersey City is unveiling a pair of new art installations this April Fools Day — one that will have you virtually climbing the walls.
Argentine conceptual artist Leandro Erlich’s interactive “The Building” uses a strategically placed jumbo mirror to reflect members of the public on the façade of a New York City apartment building in seemingly gravity-defying poses.
The exhibit will be introduced during a private opening reception on Saturday, April 1, and then be open to the public starting Sunday, April 2.
Also opening this weekend is Brooklyn native Dustin Yellen’s 2018 large-scale allegorical sculpture “The Politics of Eternity,” a three-dimensional mixed media collage embedded in laminated glass.
Erlich likened “The Building” to a theatrical stage where the cast — in this case, members of the public — can draw on their imagination to create their own narrative.
“I usually think that the audience inside a work plays the role of an actor, simultaneously plays the role of the interpreter and at the same time, plays the role of the audience looking at someone else.,” the 50-year-old Buenos Aires native said in an interview with Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator at Museum of Fine Art Houston, where a similar installation by Erlich recently was exhibited. “It’s like someone is looking at someone else doing something and at that time the person is a witness, but immediately after or before, that person was the person who was playing a role and whatever the role is, it presents itself as something spontaneous.”
That spontaneity can translate to anything from hanging off a fire escape by your fingertips, walking up and down the side of the building or grasping the ankle of someone dangling upside down from a third-story window.
Yellen’s chevron-shaped “The Politics of Eternity” aims to be perspective-altering in a different way. According to the description on the 47-year-old artist’s website, it “teases how our contemporary landscape, no matter how diverse, is frozen between an illustrious, if not imagined past, and a promised, yet uncertain future.”
Yellin used layered-glass sculptures to create enmeshed networks consisting of hundreds of tiny National Geographic magazines and reference books totaling 10,000 pounds. The wide array of images — an ancient sacred totem an “as-yet-born society donning jetpacks,” waterfalls, the sun, the moon and other celestial bodies, tall ships and a “Hades-like fiery underworld,” to name a few — seek to show that “just because people share the same physical space does not mean that they share the same history or, more importantly, desires.”
Erlich’s installation will remain on display through the summer, and Yellin’s will be on display until next year.
Both exhibits are part of LSC’s new Big Art program.
The center is located at 222 Jersey City Blvd. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays to Fridays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, with extended hours for spring break. General admission is $25-$32.
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