Tom Sullens
Jersey Run

Tom Sullens
                                                      ©Tom Sullens

March 2 to April 1, 2006
Opening Reception Thursday March 2, 6 to 8 PM

 

 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.

Tom Sullens

© Tom Sullens