Andrew Harrison’s ‘This Was Always a Place’ offers a new way to look at New Jersey, and more

“Garden City” is part of Andrew Harrison’s “(New) Jersey” series, which currently can be seen The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit.

A very odd picture of Manhattan will hang at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit until Jan. 18. Andrew Harrison’s image of the island on the other side of The Hudson River is assembled from spliced fragments of maps of The Garden State. The artist, who lives and works in Mercer County, has cut out New Jersey municipalities from his atlas, reassembled them, smoothed them out, and printed the results. He has trampled familiar towns and poured the brew into a Gotham-shaped decanter. There it chills, ready to startle, confuse and enlighten anyone willing to partake in Harrison’s particular combination of curiosity and fury.

Andrew Harrison’s Manhattan map.

It is easy to read “(New) Jersey,” a highlight of his solo show “This Was Always a Place,” as a comment on the political fragmentation of our home state. We are 47th of 50 in size, but we are divided into 566 municipalities, each with its own officials, its own ordinances, and its own sense of identity and territorial pride. This drives advocates of good government bananas, but we often wear our micro-loyalties proudly. Harrison’s shuffled reassembly of New Jersey in the shape of New York is a portrait of a state that has shattered like a pane of glass into hundreds of shards, swept up and stored someplace more secure. At least from our perspective, Manhattan is a model of stability. By contrast, we’re confetti in the wind.

If that description makes “This Was Always a Place” sound didactic … it really isn’t. Harrison is much more interested in investigating the way our social conditions arise from the rude facts of our surroundings than he is in writing a prescription for our ills. This artist loves charts, but a cartographer he is not: He seems to believe that maps represent a vain attempt to fix things in place that are forever moving around and slipping between jurisdictions in our minds. No matter how we try to define the contours of our towns, cities and states, the notorious fluidity of community and happenstance will always get in the way.

To reinforce that point, Harrison chops up cartographic New Jersey and re-orders it in the shape of places other than New York. The picture of an altered Manhattan is the most recognizable piece in the “(New) Jersey” series, but it is hardly the only departure. Harrison has unfolded the Garden State forests and highways in a fan-like array of green and red similar to Brasilia, and stacks town upon town in a ziggurat reminiscent of an Aztec temple. His metamorphic New Jersey even skips the boundaries of probability and colors the lands of myth. Garden State waterways and beaches become the shores of the Garden of Eden. A chain of roads and familiar names is smelted down by the copier and the printer into El Dorado, the fabled City of Gold.

These places are literary constructs. It is possible that El Dorado was based on an actual locality somewhere in South America, but it has come to us in translation, through an elaborate game of Telephone. After centuries of embellishment and reinterpretation, what we receive has little resemblance to any place we can reach by car or plane.

Harrison’s show hints that mapping is often like that. Representations created by mapmakers are full of flattenings, stretchings, smoothings, emphasizings and de-emphasizings, and other not-so-subtle distortions. Harrison remains acutely aware of the atlas as an aesthetic object with fonts and colors — the flat and impassive blues of bodies of water, the crimson streaks of road — chosen to suit the needs of motorists hungry for quick legibility. For decades, we relied on Rand McNally’s interpretation of the country as it is seen, nervously and at top speed, from the highway. Today, we treat Google Maps and GPS with respect reserved for oracles. “This Was Always a Place,” then, is an act of irreverence: an impish re-ordering of a state, and a world, presented to us by unnamed authorities with the power to draw boundaries and demarcations. Borders, after all, are every bit as imaginary as the El Dorado. You will never bump into the line between two towns, or two countries. The divisions they enforce exist only in our minds.

Andrew Harrison’s “Seneca Displaced: A Tree for Andrew Williams,” at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.

Recognition of this fact may feel liberating. It is also scary. The mutability of place means that entire towns can be erased and the maps can simply be rewritten as if they were never there. “Seneca Displaced: A Tree for Andrew Williams,” another installation in “This Was Always a Place,” is Harrison’s engagement with a 19th century settlement that was vigorously erased through eminent domain. Seneca Village was an attempt by the African Americans of early Manhattan to claim a piece of the map for themselves and accrue political and social power in a society that discriminated against them. Once it was thriving. Today, it exists in no city gazette. Just before The Civil War, the City seized the neighborhood and dispersed its community to make way for Central Park and its great reservoir. As has happened too often in American history, a prosperous nonwhite community was expunged by white authorities, and the atlas was redrawn accordingly.

As an act of commemoration, grieving and mental revision, Harrison unearthed wood from Central Park, painted it black and fashioned it into a bare-branched tree, affixed it to the rear of his bicycle, and pedaled from the former site of Seneca Village to Harlem. He dedicated the trip, and the three-minute film that commemorates the ride, to Andrew Williams, one of the cornerstone landowners of the Village. “This Was Always a Place” presents the bike, the tree and the mournful little movie side by side. What probably would have been inscrutable to viewers if left on its own is, when coupled with “(New) Jersey,” a tough-minded acknowledgment of the reality of erasure, and the daily possibility that our communities will be changed for the worse or eradicated altogether without the compensation of remembrance.

Part of Andrew Harrison’s “Black El Dorado” at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.

It is also contextualized by “Black El Dorado,” the final third of this strange and powerful exhibition. Harrison has painted gouache rings, curves and rays alongside prints of images from the archives of the civil rights leader and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois. The material from Du Bois’ files is in grayscale; the painted adornments are bright primary colors. The artist returns, vigorously, to the symbol of the bare tree, and depicts trunks erupting from the heads of historical figures and old buildings.

Everybody and everything is tangled in roots — doubled, encircled and refracted. Yet nobody feels constrained. Instead, every stroke contains Harrison’s hope: that those who draw new lines will be more compassionate than those who drew the old ones.

Andrew Harrison’s “This Was Always a Place” can be seen at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit through Jan. 18. Visit artcenternj.org.

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