Green Mind
Chazz Jogie at 313 Gallery
Took advantage of a mild Sunday afternoon for a stroll down to Jersey City neighborhood gallery 313, which is currently exhibiting the artwork of Chazz Jogie and Narciso Espiritu. I got to know Chazz a little bit as a customer at the local indie Word Bookstore, where he works; an affable chap, he has a wide-ranging knowledge of science fiction, speculative writing, and graphic art.
Jogie’s artwork, not surprisingly, has the imaginative flair and visual flamboyance of someone who has been reared on a rich diet of alternative visual culture, poster art, fantasy, and dystopian fiction, full of skeletons, wasted nightmare-scapes, colorful hallucinations, and vivid psychotropic hues. What sets his artwork apart, in my view, is his wide-ranging use of a variety of media, from ink to marker to acrylic paint, to produce a deeply layered and textured field that gives much of the work a lambent inner glow. This facility with media is what, to my mind, sets Jogie’s work above the usual run of this ilk.
Espiritu, meanwhile, shares his gallerymate’s sense of whimsy and vivid visual vocabulary, while edging towards an anime-inflected graphic novel-style aesthetic that is remarkably accomplished in its own right. All told, a show worth making the trek out to Jersey City for.
