ACrackin theCosmic Chachka:
Shopping at a Carnival of Souls 

by Grian MacGregor

You get a funny feeling that Carnival of Souls is the lodge hall of the local chapter of the International Order of the Sideways. It may well be, but it's also an arts and gifts gallery on Market Street in Saugerties, New York. The window display in the old Lamb's Hardware building took me by surprise. I felt like Dorothy did when the Emerald City first appeared in the distance. 

If Eddie Bauer ever collaborated with Cyndi Lauper on a home catalog, it might look something like this gallery. It Marcel Duchamp had taken himself less seriously, he might have shown here. And if Beatrice Wood weren't commanding five figure prices, she'd fit right in. 

Where else in Ulster County are you going to find: a hand-thrown ceramic vase with a map of Ulster County painted on the surface, with the option of having your house featured in the glaze; a pair of fur-trimmed rubber gloves (the yellow-on-the-outside, white-on-the-inside, dish washing variety); or the kind of deconstructed, reconstructed, overpainted furniture that had so much potential, it makes you wish you were so lucky? 

Gail Cadden and Ralph Del Pozzo are the designers and printers of the silk-screened clothing that is featured in the shop, and produced on-site by their two companies, Yink ink and Holey Mackerel. Gail and Ralph and the artists who consign with them take their work seriously enough to do it well, but not so seriously that they get arrogant about it. Here you find the creative output of individuals whose aesthetics lay like custard between cakey layers of whimsy and eccentricity, with a bright icing of genuine affection for the world. 

What do they want people to know about their gallery? Gail says, "It’s fun; it’s colorful; to walk in the door you have to be pretty free-spirited. Philosophically we’re into folk-art. Art with a utilitarian application. If you’re going to have a flowerpot, you might as well have a really cool one. And we like to work with people in the area." There are fabulously creative folks in these parts. Some are shy, some are sly. 

Carnival Of Souls shows their work. And their work can raise your spirits aloft. It's not simply that friends who know me best shop in dumpsters for my Christmas gifts. It's not that reincarnation is a foregone conclusion. It's not even that being passed on the thruway by a tractor trailer full of chocolate pudding is enough to put me off the brown goo for life. It's just that to happen upon a den of seers who find mystery, merit. nay, glamour in the uniquely commonplace is a welcome reprieve from so much global Gap-ification, J. Crew-ization and Crate-and-Barrelizing. Gail says that all of twenty-five percent of the people who walk into the gallery get it 

"Revel in the mundane; that's what we have more of than anything else," says the third soul at the carnival, Ed Doyle. "The store is accessible to artists. We take the pain away from representing your own work." 

I found Ed in his basement, which resembles a seven-year-old's clubhouse hideout, only with power tools. "Come down into the dungeon, darling," he calls upstairs when his girlfriend, Fiona, lets me in. I shuck off my parka and down the dark steps I go. He's got a hex wrench in his hand, tightening the blade on a table saw. Nearby, a workbench is covered by his work-in-progress, a series of freestanding picture frames. The ghosts of my art history background are hissing at me to tell you that the frames have hand-out juxtaposed wooden embellishments and polychromed surfaces surrounding the picture plane. Forget about that. What you need to know about any of these joyfully vivid shrines is that it's a great way to display a picture of someone you love—including you; that it's designed to sit in a window and let your dear one's radiance brighten a room; and that when you turn the thing over and see that the photo-mounting system is accomplished with a staple gun and some half-inch wide elastic, you know you're witnessing a home-grown genius that's too authentic to be ordinary. "I don't call myself an artist. I'm a curious person," Ed says. 

Years ago, after one of my puppet shows in New England, a man who had been in the audience won a place in my heart forever when he said to me, "Congratulations. When the world falls apart and it all comes crashing down, you'll be surviving with the rats in the sewers." This was great news, since surviving with the rats in the sewers is something I dearly want to do. And I am certain that when it happens Ed will be there. 

"Invent your own day job, and keep it," he says. He’s the home manager for several area musicians, looking after their estates and personal affairs while they're on the road—a perfect occupation for the oldest child of deaf parents who integrated responsibility into his disposition white he was too young to be downtrodden by it. "I specialize in small miracles." One of those miracles is a doll house that he built and outfitted, which looks like it was airlifted from Santa Fe, complete with saguaro in the front yard, adobe contours and sunset coloring. It now belongs to Brittany, Fiona's five-year-old daughter, but if you have any appreciation at all for things whose entire life-cycles are spent away from shopping malls, you have a treat in store for you at Carnival of Souls. The gallery is home to a whole after-market category of art-with-a-purpose that I think of as 'refurbiture". Like the chrome bar stools with seats upholstered in a fabric that elevates them beyond the realm of your everyday sitting appliance. When was the last time a bar stool made you think? Or smile? 

Carnival of Souls: House of Art, Local Color is open 11-5 daily except for Tuesday and Sunday. 247-0469.