“Play!” at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery Is a Whimsical Antidote to the Winter Doldrums

“I feel like it’s especially nice now to have a reprieve from bleakness and heaviness and be in a space that’s really about joy,” Sullivan says. And indeed, with another icy cold weekend upon us in New York, a jaunt to a show literally called “Play!” offers a respite from winter’s bite. (The climb up to the gallery’s perch on the building’s fourth floor is also sure to warm you.)

On the contemporary artist side, the duo Libby Rosen contributed seven luminous textile works made of marbled quilted fabric. Elliot Camarra, originally from Cape Cod, created works from paper, metal, glass, and wood that evoke the sea. McCollough’s take on a Queen Anne’s cabinet floats magically in a corner (open the doors for a surprise).

Other vintage highlights include a 1989 chaise lounge with wrought iron arms in the shape of a horse, a pair of circus-coded Murano glass pendant lights, a classic-cool 1973 coat rack from Ettore Sottsass (“he had to be in the show,” says Sullivan), and an assortment of fruit-shaped silver boxes used for storing betel nut, a stimulant popular in Southeast Asia. A show-stopper of a lamp, made in 1977 by the late Garry Knox Bennett, a mentor of McCollough’s, lights up by touching its tail.

Sullivan, raised in Massachusetts and now based in New York, started her gallery as a hybrid space straddling the worlds of decorative arts and fine art, of things made yesterday and over a century ago. “We don’t really differentiate…it’s just all living, breathing things in a room,” she says. But it took time for people to grasp the concept. “They really didn’t understand where to put us,” she says. “There was no real blueprint, which is fun but also a little bit challenging, doing something that doesn’t necessarily fit within the contemporary art space or an antique showroom.”