The days on the calendar have changed but the weather hasn’t. It’s still as warm and sunny on these streets as it was during the Studio Tour. We know it won’t last: this may well be the final weekend of pedestrian perfection we’ll see until 2025. It’s peak foliage in the Bergen Arches, and an opportune moment to do as we did during the first week of October. I’ve already crowed about the strong shows at the galleries at 150 Bay Street; those will be open this weekend, and they do reward repeat viewings. But if you’re walking around Downtown and you’re interested in more, allow me to direct you to a few other interesting options — not all of which were part of JCAST 2024.Interflow @ Novado GalleryIf you’ve spent any time on the riverfront near Exchange Place and Paulus Hook, you’ve seen Michael Alfano’s eye-catching and gently provocative sculptures. Alfaro presents the commuter with potent slivers of personality — crescent portions of human faces, or faces like orange peels, that manage to convey full expressions. In one of the most memorable pieces, a cascade of yellow paint poured from a bucket coheres into a sleep mask; in another, eyes, a nose, tight lips, and a ball-like chin strongly suggest a question mark.Heidi CurkoThe interrogative gestures continue at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.), where Alfaro’s curlicue heads stare back from a wall. These are a fraction of the size of the ones that decorate the Hudson River walkway, but they’re full of the same curiosity about faces and what they do, and how clearly our features speak to us, and others, about who we are and how we’re feeling. Even a scrap of an expression, it turns out, tells us plenty, even as it prompts us to fill in the blank spaces.  Steve DatzOther pieces in the group show “Interflow” exhibit a similar sense of play, even as they lean toward greater abstraction. Collaborative paintings and drawings from Heidi Curko and Jed Miner are a neural net of crooked lines and swirls, some interacting, some fading away, all giving a sense of depth to two-dimensional pieces. These marks can resemble a half-remembered written language — or, perhaps, as in the large-scale “Drawings for Cats 2,” full of sharp angles and tiny lightning-flash shapes, a transmission that only animals can hear. Still more intriguing are the moody acrylic-painted landscapes by Steve Datz, whose horizons are artfully smothered on both sides of the line by washes of color. (Novado Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 11 a.m to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursdays.) Home @ Art House ProductionsDatz’s landscapes blur the line between land and sky. If we surrender to his pieces — and they’re so pretty that we can’t help ourselves — we find ourselves suspended somewhere that we aren’t quite sure is terra firma. It’s the thrill of destabilization that he’s working with, and it’s one that’s fun to experience, at least for the duration it takes to look at a picture. A similar thing happens at “Home,” Andrea McKenna’s latest first-rate curation at the Art House Productions gallery (345 Marin Blvd.).  She’s selected pieces that trouble the boundaries of what we possess and what we don’t, and that examine the distance between the homes we inhabit and the homes that exist in our heads.Tina ManecaAnd again, she does it in very few strokes. The Art House Productions gallery is bright and airy, and it’s got high ceilings. But it’s also pretty tight, and the close quarters magnify every curatorial gesture. Everything in the nine-artist group show speaks eloquently to the theme of the precarity and ambiguity of home: Tina Maneca’s barbed nest, for instance, or her bird feeder with an entrance that looks very much like a blade poised to fall, or Jen Morris’s elegant oil and mixed-media piece that situates a smart living room chair and strips of wallpaper in a nebulous field of green, or Greg Brickey’s array of windows and drapes surrounded by a grey mist dotted with shooting stars. Greg BrickeyAre we inside the home looking out, or outside looking in? Does it matter? It sure does to Mary Jean Canziani’s “Imaginative Man,” who huddles under a blanket outside a smart suburban home. He’s been rendered in paint — as most of Canziani’s characters are — on the hardcover of an old book. He’s stuck on the surface, unable to access the house on the front of the piece or the pages turned toward the wall. It all culminates in “One Year at Home, Sept. 2023-2024,” a thrill of a painting in two panels by the Jersey City artist Mark Kurdziel, a favorite of the gallery. In the first and larger segment, a young woman stands expectantly on a throw rug. All around her are signs of domesticity: vases, furniture, wine and fruit on a table, a housecat at her feet and another in her arms. But behind her, the walls of her house appear to be dissolving into nature. Fish appear to be swimming in midair. Flowers grow wild, bursting from the ground in pink, red, and purple. Even the pets are wild-eyed and restless. The permeability of home is underscored in the second panel, where a woman (the same woman?) is now naked with her arms raised in a gesture of abandon. The walls have fallen away completely. The house now appears in the distance, framed by a mountain, a patchwork sky, and a landslide of pink foliage. Notably, she’s peeking out from the side of the painting; a full third of her body isn’t depicted. Either she’s slipping away from us — away from home and its attendant responsibilities — or this story is yet to be continued.(Art House Productions Gallery is open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays ad Sundays. “Home” closes on October 27.)In the Pink @ Casa ColomboKurdzeil makes liberal use of pink paint, brightening up the corners and imparting a definite sense of femininity to his two panels. Hot pink seems to connote willful disobedience, unconscious agitation, the call of sunshine, and the overturning of the domestic order. To Lisa Collodoro, curator at Casa Colombo (380 Monmouth St.), pink is not quite so volatile. In her pieces, she makes colors behave: she draws the black lines and fills the spaces with bright colors evenly and carefully. Her juxtapositions of shape and hue are both elaborate and deliberate: she’s in control. Collodoro’s colors are bright enough to rear up and bite viewers, but her hand stays steady on the leash.Lisa Collodoro“In the Pink,” her latest adventure in tone and rhythm, is a neatly arranged bouquet of roses. She’s hung her paintings alongside those of Vincent Salvati, another believer in the expressive power of pinkness. He’s given us fields of light powder pink, fierce Valentine pink, neutral Pepto-Bismol pink, and pink so rich it verges on zinfandel, all melting and merging in fields and circles. They tickle the eye and apply rouge to the cheeks of passersby. But the main action is on Collodoro’s side of the room, where the painter has fitted pink squares within darker pink squares, and assembled shape, line, and symbol with a dedication (and sub rosa mysticism) that verges on the runic. Her work evokes clocks, flowcharts, graphs, videogames, and circuit diagrams for the assembly of benign machinery.  So evenly does she apply her paint that it occasionally evokes stained glass windows. It’s tempting to speculate both where Collodoro’s arrows are pointing and which pastel block would collapse, Jenga-style, if another one of her pastel slipped out of place. But it’s best to step back and take “In the Pink” as a totality — a squared-away vision from an artist with her own sense of sacred geometry. (Casa Colombo is open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m to 3 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday.)The post Three Downtown Shows Fit for a Fall Day appeared first on Jersey City Times.