Exhibition Puts Professor’s “Personal Effects” on View

PARAMUS, N.J. – “Personal Effects: Works by Gregg Biermann,” an exhibition featuring large-scale video installations and still images by a Bergen Community College faculty member, will open on Thursday, September 18 at 6 p.m. in Gallery Bergen, the College’s art exhibition space located at the institution’s main campus (400 Paramus Road, Paramus). The exhibition is hosted in collaboration with the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee.

Biermann, an award-winning experimental filmmaker and artist who teaches art, film, and communications at the College, collapsed due to sudden cardiac arrest - an often-fatal arrhythmia - in 2020. He survived due to the efforts of a bystander nurse and members of the Wyckoff Police Department who performed life-saving measures. Biermann’s “Personal Effects” film features video of the ordeal captured by another bystander.

“The problem of death eats all other problems because no subject remains to experience them,” he said. “After discovering that my collapse had been recorded, I realized I had the raw material for a film that could process the emotional and philosophical weight to that experience.”

The Gallery Bergen exhibition will feature Biermann’s work, which includes experimental art that takes Hollywood classics and distorts them to encourage deeper examination.

“His works are mathematical in nature, and they explore the canon of old films,” Gallery Bergen Director Tim Blunk said. “He carves them up formalistically and recomposites them in interesting ways, and they are always done with music that he composes himself.”

As a cohost of the exhibition, the Barrymore Center will host a screening of the “Personal Effects” film on Sunday, October 19 at 4:30 p.m. at its 153 Main Street location in Fort Lee.

The Gallery Bergen exhibition will remain on view through Friday, December 5. For Gallery Bergen hours, visit gallery.bergen.edu. For more information, email tblunk@bergen.edu.

Based in Paramus, Bergen Community College (www.bergen.edu), a public two-year coeducational college, enrolls more than 14,000 students at locations in Paramus, the Philip Ciarco Jr. Learning Center in Hackensack and Bergen Community College at the Meadowlands in Lyndhurst. The College offers associate degree, certificate and continuing education programs in a variety of fields. More students graduate from Bergen than any other community college in the state.