The Tamesis
“I think it’s great to be out of the gloom and heaviness and into a space that’s really filled with joy,” Sullivan said. In fact, with another icy New York weekend approaching, we went to a show called “Play!” Provides respite from the harsh winter temperatures. (Climbing up to the building’s fourth-floor gallery location is sure to warm you up, too.)
On the contemporary artist side, duo Libby Rosen contributed seven luminous textile pieces made from marbled quilted fabric. Elliot Camarra, originally from Cape Cod, uses paper, metal, glass and wood to create works that evoke the sea. A McCollough-designed Queen Anne cabinet magically floats in the corner (open the door for a surprise).
Other vintage highlights include a 1989 chaise longue with horse-shaped wrought-iron armrests, a pair of circus-coded Murano glass chandeliers, Ettore Sottsass’s 1973 classic cool coat rack (“He had to be in the show,” Sullivan says), and an assortment of fruit-shaped silver boxes used to store betel nut, a stimulant popular in Southeast Asia. McCollough’s mentor, the late Garry Knox Bennett, created a striking lamp in 1977 that lit up by touching the tail.
Sullivan grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in New York, and her gallery is a hybrid space that straddles the worlds of decorative arts and fine art, made up of things made yesterday and more than a century ago. “We don’t really differentiate…it’s just all living, breathing things in the room,” she said. But it takes time for people to understand the concept. “They really didn’t know where to put us,” she said. “There was no real blueprint, which was fun, but also a little challenging, to do something that wouldn’t necessarily fit in a contemporary art space or an antiques showroom.”
