Rust never disappoints in Jerome China’s ‘Without Further Ado’ show at Artworks Trenton

TRIS McCALL

Jerome China’s “Ideogram” can be seen at Artworks Trenton through Aug. 15.

If you were ever an awed kid rummaging around in your parents’ or grandparents’ garage, you are familiar with the mystique of rust. Oxidation lends dignity and an aura of authority to ordinary objects. A shiny new tool belongs to the hardware store; an old and rusted one belongs to history. A patina of rust gives a surface character and a suggestion of hard use. If metal could sweat, rust is what it would look like.

It is also beautiful. Painters would be lucky to mix such complex shades of reddish-brown. A rusted object feels softer than one that isn’t so touched. It is friendly enough to engage in a handshake with the air.

Jerome China’s metal sculptures, for instance, lead with their brawn, and arrive in our fields of vision with a sense of inevitability and unshakability. But because they are so gorgeously rusted, they are easy to embrace. The longer you look at them, the more pain they appear to contain.

In “Without Further Ado,” an emotional one-man show at Artworks Trenton curated by Addison Vincent, the African-American sculptor finds that midpoint between vulnerability and toughness common to engaging art across all mediums. These pieces suggest strength but not rigidity, belief but not dogmatism, and escape from the bondage of the material rather than submission to its weight.

Sometimes his pieces feel like a rebuke to the coercive demands of gravity. In “Stacked Against Us,” rectangular pipe segments form a six-foot sluice that bends, gentle as a freshly crested wave, in the direction of the gallery door. The graceful vertical lines of the piece are broken, here and there and quite strategically, by the horizontal apertures of the block-like pipes. This post-industrial pillar rises according to its own interior logic. It radiates determination not to topple. The rust overcoat on the statue amplifies its dignity. This amalgamation of old tubes has its own interior balance — one that conforms to no standard calibration.

TRIS McCALL

Jerome China’s “Stacked Against Us.”

If it sounds like I am assigning personal characteristics to inanimate objects … consider that an acknowledgment of China’s human-centered vision. “Stacked Against Us” is the least anthropomorphic piece in this show. Most of the rest of these sculptures look, unmistakably, like people in action or faces set against fate. China assembles found bits of steel, scrap iron and field parts into shapes that either evoke the body or something a body might do.

“Ideogram” (see above) evokes a fast walker, circular head held high and proud, hair streaming, back bent forward, butt elevated, and thin limbs leading the way, braced against the future. This kinetic character is made from long nails and rail spikes, ring molds, bent rods, more rectangular pipe segments, a well-filleted grate, and a decorative iron curlicue. The artist has gotten these minerals to move.

Other pieces venture deeper into the barn. China admires the thick tines of rakes and old, rusted-out rotors, and he likes to drape chains around his assemblies of old equipment and slip padlocks into their links. The business ends of pitchforks jut toward the sky, threaten the ground, and interlock with horseshoes, heavy-duty wrenches, and the flat blades of hoes. If you had been a sharecropper, this might have been the contents of your shed. If you were brought to the United States in bondage, these might have been your tools and, possibly, your weapons. China’s heavy metal feels like it was retrieved from troubled American soil.

Yet he also looks to the other side of the Atlantic. Some of the most exciting pieces in “Without Further Ado” are the wall-hung metal sculptures made to resemble West African masks. China’s amalgamations are neither sinister nor impassive; instead, they’re watchful, serious, distrustful but never disengaged.

TRIS McCALL

Jerome China’s “The Earth Remember Us.”

“The Earth Remember Us” has a forehead like a battered plate of armor and a brow as heavy as a lead weight. To generate the effect of solidity and consternation, China has had to juxtapose a pair of molded steel scraps at an inspired angle and place them atop a slat-like piece of metal that resembles an unbreakable nose. Does this character have anything to say, though? Two overlapping gears where his lips should be tells us that he does, but the wire mesh behind them looks an awful lot like a gag.

“What I Found in the Ground Was Us” is an expression of pure alarm: decorative metal swirls like those at the end of wrought-iron banisters in the place of eyes and an inverted metal cup for a mouth. It is possible to see a little wall between the metal slats that make up his face, but his sutures and clamps hold him together even as his expression suggests he is coming apart

Other mask-like sculptures allow the artist to put his oddball sense of humor on display. “The Tools Remember” is a curious, googly-eyed face made almost entirely out of vises. (These old workbench hangers-on bear a visible mark of manufacture significant to this show: China.) In keeping with the devices that give his cheekbones definition, the subject of the piece looks clenched. He’s got a bent rail-tie like an upside-down ampersand for a mouth and furrows on his face made of long spiral screws.

Even more expressive, and even funnier, is the free-standing “I’m the Sum of All of My Parts” — a joker with a horseshoe smile, a case handle for a nose, and wide-open bolts for eyeballs. He comes to us as gently as such a golem ever could, resting on the blunt points and flame-heated curves of fireplace pokers.

TRIS McCALL

Jerome China’s “The Tools Remember.”

China is not the first sculptor to find an American story in the rusted-out quadrants of the junkyard. Joe Minter, a sculptor from Alabama, also makes prickly pieces with rusted rakes, spades, saws and chains. Minter’s work is, without a doubt, a reckoning with slavery, coerced labor, emaciation and famine, and the restless bones of the exploited that still trouble American soil. But while Minter’s hubcap humans radiate heat-blasted exhaustion and can feel as stationary as sunflowers, China’s fabrications look like they’re ready for a fight. There is nothing sessile about his steel humanoids. They’ve got the dents of those who have seen battle.

Freedom is a major theme of “Without Further Ado,” and Jerome China proceeds like a man who believes release from captivity is possible. Fences are made from metal, but so are the crowbars that can pry them open or knock them down.

In “Escape Mechanism,” he has hung an emergency kit for the incarcerated on the bars of a cage and supplied us with gears, shears, sharp-looking iron shingles, and a dangling, phallic spike that begs to be yanked. It’s all pockmarked and oxidized, but that may mean that it has been used many times before. You could be the next to grab hold of your opportunities and turn yourself loose.

“Without Further Ado: Jerome China” will be at Artworks Trenton through Aug. 15, and China will give a talk at 6 p.m. Aug. 14. Visit artworkstrenton.org.
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