It began innocently enough. We were thinking of a show to help us weather the winter months. Should we do a show about staying warm? Throw off the mantle of the self-serious gallery! Things are serious enough out there already. Welcome blissful intemperance! What do we want most of all during this next handful of months, really? To cover our homes, bodies and brains with something cozy. Something snuggly. 

What became The Snuggle Show, thankfully, is not purely a vacation from thought. Brains, after all, need to do a bit of work to stay warm. (As Oscar Wilde reminds us, “wisdom comes with winters.”) The artists in this show find ways to present comfort as something woven with weirdness, humor and introspection.

Carly Haffner’s painted canvases of wintry scenes, some with the neon glow of Christmas lights, are at once delightful (childhood excitement of the season’s magic promise) and a reminder of the cold and lonely stillness of the months ahead. Jody Isaacson’s Firewood sculptures set alight the stored energy of a piece of firewood. Their beauty is in their simplicity: “It’s just…that’s what it is!” In her large digital prints she dismantles the familiar three-dimensions of firewood into a single image, creating a new shape. Again, it’s “what it is,” but in a way never seen before. Local woodworker David Day’s beefy furniture is made from trees harvested and milled on his own land.  

Many of the artists of The Snuggle Show have taken inspiration from the animals around us. Dogs conjured in spray paint by Kevin Ford become totems to super-sugar dopamine pleasure. Small canvases of front-face bears by Jerry Todd, cuddly and round as cartoons, bear expressions of various psychological states. Curious cats with pointy noses are dashed off on cardboard by Dasha Shishkin, along with story-book prints of mice engaged in un-story-book pursuits. BB&PPINC amuse with cartoon scenes of unlikely animal friends. The dignity and beauty of a lamb and cow, denizens of the muddy barn-yard, captured by Kevin Blumenthal. A stoic bear carved in rough wood by Robert Parker, rendered with minimal angles and softened with shag, sewn on by his partner Margaret Bazura. 

In The Snuggle Show, you can wrap yourself in a blanket bearing the bold narrative shapes of Damien Davis; a comfort in form while an engagement with the visual language cultures use to code and decode blackness. Natalie Zayne offers quilted abstract textiles that play with scale and function fit to warm the grey matter. 

And as B. Wurtz reminds us, winter can also be simple - “There are three important things: 1. sleeping, 2. eating, 3. keeping warm.” 

This show speaks to the transgressive facility of humor. Just like winter, the same thing that can make you smile can also numb your toes. The way a wool sweater can be cozy but also itchy. Or the heat is jacked up a little high, and you’re suddenly feeling dehydrated. 

So join us in the snuggly cold. Not to cocoon away from the winter but get weird in it. And enjoy where we are, who we’re with and who you might owe a gift.