Stories photocopied from this summer's New York Times 'Metro' section and included in this exhibition note that veteran New York prostitutes are being driven out of Manhattan by 'crackstitutes' who work longer hours and turn tricks more cheaply. As a result the veterans have decided to move to New Jersey and set up where they can be left to get on with it in the pedestrian-free anonymity of semi-trailer parks and highway exit ramps.
This, it turns out, oddly echoes what artists were doing ten years ago. Jersey City in the early s was, as this exhibition reveals, home to a strange pool of organic life. Wallace Stevens described it as a place where 'the deer and the dachshund are one', an antidote to New York City, a romantic wasteland where people would end up without really knowing why.
Ellen Cantor and Joseph Grigley's collaboration is a vividly personal account. It records a time when both artists were working among the matzo factories and the Maxwell House coffee plant. The exhibition sees Grigley and Cantor's friendship evolving over a period of ten years, their lives bumping along in a series of encounters at the Flamingo Diner, in photographs and paintings but mainly in an extended written exchange. Grigley, who is deaf, has since been archiving his everyday conversations with pieces of paper on which are written the flustered, random sentences of his friends.
Around the same time Cantor abandoned oil painting to develop the subject of her intimate life in drawings on paper or directly onto the wall, with peeled-consciousness honesty.
The exhibition includes a raft of curling, handwritten notes with formal gallery text introductions. In Untitled Conversation I Hate Undertipping Grigley notes, 'I met Ellen C a couple of years ago, and one of the things that I really liked about her is her uninhibited way with words [ Central to the exhibition is Cantor's 'The Cinderella Syndrome' , a series of 64 drawings that set out the progress of an art world girl who wants not only to go to the ball but also to get balled.
