Objects of desire

Newbury Street art that wants a place in your life.

by Christopher Millis

"LIVING ROOM, DINING ROOM, GALLERY", At Gallery Naga, 67 Newbury Street, through November 31.

"WOOD WORKS", At the MacKeen Gallery, 173 Newbury Street, through December 25.

"EMERGING ARTISTS: FURNITURE & WOOD", At the Society of Arts and Crafts, 175 Newbury Street, through October 31.

Among the many ways the world divides, it splits between believers in objects and those who don't believe, between people convinced there is redemptive power in acquiring stuff and those who know better -- between, alas, the unhappy and the happy. With the exception of the very rich, of whom there are so few they may not even count, worshippers of Mont Blanc pens and German cars and ranches in Patagonia are driven by both an aesthetic and a logical failure: value is designated, not inherent.

Only when you realize that it's the food that matters more than the cutlery and the plateware, or that the walk in the woods will always dwarf the home you return to, are you free to create enticing forks and dizzying dishes and architecture that wants to last generations. And it's in that spirit, the spirit of the blissfully unimportant, that we can appreciate the remarkable, painstaking, gorgeous work of those we call craftspeople, those whose art wants a place in our lived rather than our detached lives: chair designers and cabinet makers and the architects of medicine cabinets and shelves, the people whom mass-market manufacturing has mostly obliterated from our lives, the way supermarkets make us forget there used to be healthy food.

Three galleries along Newbury Street are currently featuring the work of designers whose métier is the world of bathrooms and studies, parlors and kitchens, artists creating one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture every bit as idiosyncratic and inspired as a Christo-wrapped Reichstagsgebäude or a Warhol silkscreen. And like the art that more traditionally earns that designation, the studio furniture on display at the Society of Arts and Crafts, Gallery Naga, and the newly established MacKeen Gallery ranges from the transcendent to the mediocre, from the ethereal to the inept. No matter. All three spots are worth a visit; in some instances, they may be worth a bank loan.

Two stars shine prominently in the upholstered cosmos of Boston's art strip, one at the Society and another at Naga, where Jere Osgood and John Dunnigan, respectively, have contributed objects of immense and unexpected voluptuousness. Upstairs at the Society of Arts and Crafts in a room with a dozen other seductive distractions stands the relatively austere desk of Jere Osgood. It looks like a cross between a cathedral and an athlete, an upwardly tapering affair, as if a wrestler were doing handstands in a mirror: four strong but not stocky legs beneath a torso of perfectly complementary cherry. When you face the structure's surface of magnificent simplicity, nothing suggests the surprise in store for you when it's opened; like the covers of a Chinese fan, the doors fold back and disappear into the sides of the cabinet. And what their disappearance reveals is no less extraordinary. Whereas the cover is rich and dark, the graceful interior is done in the finest bird's-eye maple, looking almost canary-colored next to the façade. Further, the interior design is entirely vertical, the drawers and shelves terraced like a slice of Tuscan countryside.

If the Osgood desk is to furniture making what a Ralph Vaughan Williams suite is to music, then John Dunnigan's "Cabinet for William Morris" at Gallery Naga a few blocks away is a plain Shaker hymn. Forthright instead of intellectual, bulky rather than sleek, Dunnigan's homage to the Pre-Raphaelite designer is nevertheless a testament to compositional integrity of an entirely different, folksy kind. The "Cabinet" itself is nearly not a cabinet at all. And by today's crowded, make-do-in-an-urban-closet aesthetic, it looks like one big waste of space.

In fact, it's a masterpiece. A pair of airy, open shelving units with the girth of a hat box and a few feet tall, one with drawers on the bottom and the other with complementary drawers on the top, stand like boxy ladders on a large slab of elegant, thick wood that resembles a door. The entire unit stands on what appears to be a continuation of the two shelf sets so that the construction seems part desk, part display case, part exposed wardrobe, both familiar and unidentifiable. In fact, the "Cabinet" has an all-purpose, works-in-any-room quality that makes it seem far more American than Jere Osgood's refined, European sensibility. And that's only the beginning. Upon inspection you discover that the Australian lacewood, darkly hued and reminiscent of oak, has been subtly treated (painted and then almost completely wiped clean) with white on the left shelves (and drawers and knobs) and black on the right. The result is an unexpected bilateral symmetry, negative and positive in one glance.

However astonishing these two masterworks at Gallery Naga and the Society of Arts and Crafts, virtually every other item on display in both locations is equally accomplished. Among the highlights at Naga are Steve Whittlesey's skinny, irascible shelves that marry doors of colorfully unrefined surfaces (strips of tobacco shed, planks of old painted, chipping wood) to utterly decorous interiors. No less delightful is Bill Bancroft's mahogany and maple mirror surrounded by 24 textured, tiny blue drawers. Each drawer wears a bright nickel-plated pull at a contrary angle to its neighbor; it's like the marriage of a spice cabinet, a jewelry box, and an old-fashioned compositor's tray. Not to be missed at the Society are Jamie Robertson's "Media Cabinet," a design somewhere between The Wizard of Oz and The Jetsons, and Peter Pierobon's "Energy Column," which looks like a chest of drawers fitted in a designer condom.

The newly opened MacKeen Gallery offers a variety of accomplished works, but few stand up to the refinement of the other shows' items. David Ebner's chairs and corner table are both polished and sexy -- his six-foot coat rack in the shape of a scallion is by far the most intriguing and delightful work here. His collaborations with Ivan Barnett are comparatively weak, however, bistro trays painted in a stale mimickry of Matisse, a matching stool and mirror that read like thesis work jockeyed into a commercial place. Similarly, Henry Miller's long, low-slung steel or steel and mahogany coffee tables -- they come in thin, two-part units like the legs of industrial insects -- enjoy a rare commingling of wit and seriousness, and his "Eiffel Chair," with its pointed zigzag back and seat of veneered birch, is neither comfortable to sit in nor meticulously executed: the pinnacle of the chair's back is uneven and dulled. And for any craft to tower, it has to look sharp.