New Haven Independent

Later on she’ll tell you how her 50-pound daughter was kicked in the head by a 850-pound horse. The good news is that only a rib cage was broken. The bad, those hospital bills that can’t be paid.

So Larissa Hall writes in her hilarious Holiday_Letter_Draft1.doc, a finely tuned satiric send-up of that WASP staple, the annual family sum-up letter. With nice irony it accompanies her cheerily colored wall installation that greets you on entering the Parachute Gallery’s latest exhibition, Family Business.

In the acrylic on fabric painting, you’re supposed to pick out the visual correlatives of the family disaster you read about in the holiday letter, according to the gallery’s coordinator, Rebecca Miller. A kind of treasure hunt for the dysfunctional, and she says the many groups of kids visiting are completely into it.

Judy Gelles displays a series of photographs about the joys of motherhood that echo Weegee’s crime scenes in the Naked, often amusing, City of family life.

The caption beneath this one says: “One day I would like to go to the bathroom alone.”

And this one reads: “On Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon Jason is at nursery school and David naps, and I have one and one half hours of free time to be creative and do important things.” The title of the piece is Self Portrait Watching Soaps.

Family Business, Parachute’s third exhibition, is indeed the perfect theme not only for the just finished holiday season — after all, even the holy family had some serious issues with shelter and paternity — but also for the Parachute Gallery.The relatively new gallery, situated in Erector Square, is a collaboration between the the Arts Council and Yale’s Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH).

The aim of the gallery’s programming, said Miller, is to build bridges with the vibrant arts scene in New Haven, so that attending galleries as well as making art can become part of the recovery of people living with serious mental health problems.

But the show is, of course, for everyone, and has such variety of aspect: gay families, sexy families, divorcing families, families trying to discover their past or invent it, even a three-generation Bresnick family of artists. It is such variety of media that even Tolstoy, if he were to parachute in from the beyond, might have to disabused of the notion that all happy families are alike.

For example, Paul Nash was so happy with his baby Nigel, he took a photo of him every day of his life. These thousands of views are now on a video monitor you can play, a form of manually controlled animation.

And Yoon Cho was tired of her relatives asking when she and her husband were going to have a baby. So she started sending out letters with these yellow images — yellow because it’s gender-neutral — of a future baby, carriage, and suburban life. That became her series of photos in the exhibition called Nuclear Family Project.

Not all the art, of course, is a celebration of the pressured, dreary, and dysfunctional.

There are the more traditional elegies to the togetherness of family life in Steve DiGovanni’s large-scale paintings, pictured on the right, with Thuan Vu’s faux ancestral painting of a family member on the left.

In the charming sculpture by psychiatrist/artist Joe Sacio the elements are assembled from gifts he has given to family members for birthdays and prom nights. One hopes he caused no pain in taking them back for his art.

So if you enjoy your family time laced with fun, and the word “laced” is to be emphasized, the 12-plus artists the gallery has assembled will not disappoint. You can also learn serious facts about the brain and brain injury in Erika Van Natta’s video Grey Matters to Me, which she created specifically for the exhibition.

Of that organ, which is the basis of all family business, the narrator says, “Many scientists believe the brain is the single most complex object in the known universe. Weighing about three pounds, with 100 billion neurons, our minds are nothing more than the firing of the nerve cells…”

The gallery finds its stride in this show. It has ambitious plans of finding themes for its future exhibitions as well as exploring new ways for people suffering schizophrenia, addiction, and other serious conditions to participate in the busy art life of New Haven. Rebecca Miller said that if the money’s found, Parachute would like to have a significant artist residency program. Already planned is for Larissa Hall, of holiday letter fame, to work with the women of the Columbus Shelter on fashioning dolls out of the excess clothing contributed there. Many of the women at Columbus have kids but no custody of them. It will be Parachute’s contribution to the Community Living Room project, which is also sponsored by an array of health organizations including Fellowship Place and Hill Health Center.

For now, don’t miss Bob Gregson’s “Because I Said So” in Family Business. It’s described as a bicker booth, made of wood, paint, and two Rolodexes. You stand in the window. Gregson seems to be suggesting that the definition of a family is any two people who start to bicker. You flip through the hundreds of cards on the two dueling Rolodexes of insult or complain, one for each side of the window, until you find a statement that suits your mood: “You’re crazy.” Then the person opposite, flips through hers, and replies, “This happens to me all the time.” And so forth. The bicker booth is not only a hoot as art, it’s art therapy as well. Miller says PRCH staff use it to just let off steam and they don’t want it to leave.

The exhibition lights up the dark and dreary weeks of winter through February 7. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday 10 to 2 and Thursday and Friday 12 to 5, or by appointment. Be sure to bring the family with you.