New Haven Independent

In no small part the congenial sense of welcome is because the art is arrayed in the River Street Gallery that is part of the Fair Haven Furniture store. Despite the great differences among the pieces, the art relaxes in comfortable, even amicable, living-room profusion like one big Art Family that can’t decide to just chill together or enforce some quality time.

The works are displayed among the sofas, chairs, credenzas, and great wooden repast tables on sale at the gallery. They fill a pleasant sun-filled room, an adjunct to the venerable Fair Haven Furniture at River and Blatchley, and the show runs through March 21st.

Jeanne Criscola’s 16 cloth-bound boxes and digital prints (pictured at top), for example, might appear to be a variant on a bingo game the grandparents or kids left on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

But one’s home is not forever and always a place of relaxation, is it?

This small but ambitious piece titled “Tech_no_logica: Deconstructing Pixel and Code,” is part of a larger room-size installation that is to remind us that the computers and other pixelated screens we watch are made up of code, and it is the code that provides us with a digital, that is, binary and virtual, that is, unreal experience.

And yet the unreal experience employs very real words like “burn,” “copy,” and “slave.”
So, careful, this work seems to suggest, in the River Street setting, how much you let yourself relax in this living room.

Moving on to a bedroom ensemble, Ann Arbor-based artist Sarah Buckius has contributed “Fitting In: Attempts #1 and #2.” Photo-realist prints on a kind of foam board, they depict, according to the artist’s statement, various gender roles played by women through putting on and taking off of garments, from cutsie sweaters to camouflage Bermudas.

While this may be serious stuff to contemplate, there’s also a simple charm as well of the “Gee, what do I have to wear today?” variety that this reporter would find welcoming over his chaotic chest of drawers.

The quietly disturbing pleasure of Buckius’s work derives, I think, from its ability to make ordinary things, like getting dressed, extraordinary. That’s what art does best, as does religion, in making us absolutely amazed at what we have come to take for granted.

We notice clothing, hair, and our floppy limbs, and maybe even our gender in a new way. And the domestic setting for her and the other artists’ work is an excellent context for such quietly shocking rediscoveries.

It’s perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the River Street’s proprietor, Kerry Triffin, said that this other work by Buckius, 14 individual prints titled “Androgyforms,” found a buyer who absolutely loved the subject depicted: the struggles of various people in trying to get in and out of a very pesky and resistant large white T-shirt.

“Some guys just walked in,” said Triffin, “and took a look at them, and bought all ten prints.”

The gallery, he said, has about five shows a year and almost always supports Greater New Haven area based artists; Oppositions is unusual in that only four of 12 are from the area. Some shows, Triffin said, sell for the artist more than they’ve ever sold in their lives, some sell nothing.

For a small city, art in New Haven is on view in a wide variety of non-gallery, non-museum venues: banks, science labs, and clubs and restaurants, both vegetarian and carnivorous.

Yet the idea of displaying art in a setting of domestic furnishings, where unless you own a museum, your art acquisition will ultimately end up, makes River Street a natural, and unique.

“Unless you have a room of large white walls and nothing else in it,” said Triffin, “the work is going to be placed above a console, couch, or a bed in most people’s houses.”

Triffin said he thinks the art and furniture work together to create a mutually stimulating environment. Some people come looking for furniture and end up spending more time in the gallery, while others, Triffin, said, come directly to the front desk and ask to be sent to the gallery.

But we don’t suggest to the artists who show here,” he said, “that what they do should fit into our space with the furniture. Never.”

New Haven artist Meg Bloom’s cardboard panels arrayed in strips of layered fabric, which are waxed and heated, are, the artist suggests, about transformations and impermanence, something new emerging from destruction, and often by sheer accident. All well and good metaphysics, but to this reporter’s eye, the piece also looks like it might find a natural home in the kitchen, or at Sally’s or Pepe’s, as a kind of visual doxology to a Sicilian slice, with its delectable, swirling, and outer ringed elements singed just right.

Oppositions was juried by the Arts and Literature Laboratory under the general supervision of River Street’s curator Kate Paranteau. Other artists in the exhibition include Suzanne Gainer, Wes Kline, Derek Leka, of West Haven, Steven McCarthy, Giang Pham, Barbara Raidl, Pierre St-Jacques, and David Taylor, of West Hartford. The show, which runs through March 21, and is viewable Mondays and Thursdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., or by appointment, 776-3099.