Boxed Parents On View In Fair Haven

We all get a little smaller as we get older, but an entirely new perspective on aging — tiny parents in a haunted diorama — will make you think of The Incredible Shrinking Man or the revenge of Hansel and Gretel, or maybe the graphic correlative of a lyric poem.

That pleasing conundrum is contained in Paulette Rosen’s ​“My Parents Are So Small,” a mixed-media box diorama that is one of her works in Threefold, the art exhibition she is sharing with mixed-media artist Karen Wheeler and encaustic-inclined artist Amy Arledge at the River Street Gallery.

The exhibition, on the first floor at Fair Haven Furniture on River Street at Blatchley, runs through October 21. There is an artists’ reception on Saturday, Sept. 16 from 5 to 8 p.m.

The gallery doubles as a showroom for the furniture company’s wares, which at times can be a distraction — do I buy those pictures on the wall and then the sofa directly beneath them to match? Or do I buy that chair and then look around for the right picture?

However, none of that disturbed Wheeler, a mixed-media artist who teaches Photoshop and other digital techniques at the University of Bridgeport.

“It’s a great pleasure to see art in context as opposed to a pristine place like a [traditional] gallery,” she said in a brief tour on Friday, in the run-up to the opening reception.

Wheeler, who moved to Connecticut — and joined the City Gallery — in 2009, taught painting and digital techniques for many years at Wingate University near Charlotte, N.C.

She had discovered Photoshop shortly after the the imaging and design app hit the market, she said. Since then, she has become a devotee and now certified instructor for many years. ​“This is like a big box of crayons for an artist,” she said.

In Threefold, Wheeler is showing pencil drawings she has made from close observation of stiffened and modeled ribbons, which she then lit, as if on a tiny stage set. When she engages, she said, observing and then drawing pen on paper, it’s as if time stands still.

The results of that very traditional way of making art are in a sense juxtaposed with photographs of those ribbons that she then submits to the powers of Photoshop. With the app she alters, layers, adds and detracts colors and intensities, creating a range of collage or palimpsest effects.

Third in Wheeler’s quiver of inventive techniques on display is a series of pen-and-ink drawings, which she calls ​“Offerings,” that are not based on observations and almost seem to derive from surrealist techniques of automatic, spontaneous creation; in fact, many were begun in the dark, Wheeler said.

That’s right, while she and her husband snuggle up to watch a movie, Wheeler said she might begin a work and then, when the lights come on, see what kinds of lines she has created.

The general impression you get from these is cartographic — as if, in that dark, her hand were transcribing the coastline of an imaginary continent, or the contusions or journeys of her imagination.

“Some of the more adventurous lines demanded release from the page in the form of wires,” she writes in an artist statement. When the lines turn three-dimensional into wires that dangle from the paper, it activates the space and draws the viewer closer in, she added.

Paulette Rosen, who runs the book arts department at Creative Arts Workshop, knows all about drawing the viewer in through several of the box dioramas she has created. You need to put your nose up to ​“My Parents Are So Small” or ​“Text Nesting,” and then you not only see what’s going on, you feel like a giant or a god in relation to the tiny folks she has deployed in imaginary, haunting, whimsical settings.

Rosen, who also offers a wide range of photos and mixed-media explorations of birds and their feathers, said box making is increasingly popular as a a discrete technique and creation among book artists.

The boxes may have been created specifically for conservation purposes to protect rare books from light and dust, but they have gone on to become habitats or objets d’art in their own right, she said.

“They’re like little one-line poems” that come to me, she added.

The show’s third artist, Arledge, who has recently moved from New Haven to Wisconsin, is showing works in the ancient technique of encaustic, which uses hot beeswax and colored pigments to create a layered and translucent effect.

Her work, which becomes more sculptural the closer you look, along with Wheeler’s ​“Offerings,” pop up with an almost humorous and surprising effect, on tables and beside the mirrors and dressers for sale.

The show’s hours are Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday noon to 5 p.m.