Post 3 Exhibition Review

The first work that caught my eye was the collaged brown paper bag. This bag re layered with powerful imagery of Black women and historical text, created a feeling of the visceral archive of survival and societal displacement. In the context of the exhibition’s "continuous flow," this bag to me acted as heavy anchors of history. Seeing the images of fire and the handwritten notes about the statistics of Black women’s experiences makes the "paper bag" not just a disposable object, but a vessel for stories that are often discarded by mainstream history mirroring the long, often exhausting process of reclaiming one's ancestral identity and place in the world especially for minorities.

 The HOME/HERE exhibition at the Visual Arts Gallery offers a compelling look at the fluid nature of memory, and Tina Maneca’s installation, COMFORT IS AN ACTION, really grounds the show's theme of "no clear boundaries." Her work transforms the gallery space into a deceptive nursery that plays with the tension between safety and systemic struggle. I was particularly struck by the quilt and the stuffed animals; there is a haunting dedication in the craftsmanship, considering it took Maneca nine months to complete the quilt. The "stuffies," like the gray rabbit and brown bear, look cozy at a glance, but they are actually adorned with drug bags found on the streets of Jersey City. This juxtaposition is jarring—it forces you to move from a feeling of "wholesome" childhood nostalgia to the gritty reality of substance use as a coping mechanism. It’s a brilliant way to show how "home" can be both a sanctuary and a place tainted by outside pressures.

These works resonate deeply with my own artistic interests, specifically in how we use found objects to tell "imagined narratives" that are actually rooted in hard truths. Maneca’s use of "societal garbage" to build a sense of comfort is a technique I find incredibly inspiring for my own practice; it challenges the viewer to look past the surface of an object to see the trauma or history embedded within. Furthermore, the connection to ancestral memory is impossible to ignore. This exhibition reminds me that our homes are not just physical spaces, but layered tapestries of the people who came before us and the struggles they endured that is recorded through the exploration of memory. The things we experience and feel is a result of it.