Something about Stamford, Connecticut, invites repeating Gertrude Stein’s comment that “There’s no there there.” But Stein was looking for a childhood home that had vanished, and not expecting to invent a cliché for anyplace that was without the trace of a past.

What is to be made of this invented landscape, fundamentally disconnected from the world around it (as in Trisha Baga’s photograph 10.22.11 where the notion of being misplaced is made definitive, rather than exceptional)? Nothing quite fits here. Buildings are disembodied by design, with the reflecting glass of office towers that never show themselves, but only what surrounds them.

Left: Trisha Baga, 10.22.11. (2011). Photo: Courtesy the artist. artes fine arts magazine

Lukas Geronimas registers these facades in his Comfortable (Stamford) series with urban wallpapers of splendidly gridded uniformity, as in the image Landmark. Laid down on textile, the patterns evoke madras cottons, simplified into architectural dress. Another of the series, entitled Silhouette, is displayed as a rolled scroll, with its patterns almost entirely invisible. It has the attraction of those secrets we know are being contrived inside of every corporation office that we pass.

One more of Geronimas’ printed plots incorporates what might be a parody of the Papal keys and the miscreant Vatican Bank, but has a more local connection to the icon adopted by the Union Bank of Switzerland with its massive Stamford office, monetary losses, fines, and rogue traders.

There is a 15th century rendering of an ideal city, variously ascribed to the painter Piero della Francesca or the architect Leon Battista Alberti, which possesses more visual splendor than Stamford’s corporate standards would embrace. But what it has in common with urban Connecticut is an absence of visible human presence. As is the nature of bureaucracies, all the activity is indoors, out of sight.

This theme is moderated through another work by Geronimas, Rita, a rustic cellular antenna or astronomical instrument with a star fragment trapped on one of its armatures. Here is the vehicle for unseen conversations, the financial chatter that makes and unmakes the lives of the surrounding community.

This gallery, newly established, is itself a combination of former domestic spaces whose past has become a fantasy. A square of carpet at the base of one brick column is not clearly incorporated into the exhibition, yet gives a note of warning that it should be avoided. It has gone from useful decoration to pure object by virtue of the works which surround it. Its innocence is lost.

This stripping away of obvious purpose is clearly deliberate in the fragments of vaguely dysfunctional office furniture by Geronimas that are scattered around the space. Included are two useless chairs identified as indigenous to the locality. As wall pieces, they suggest small scale piano lids or architectural templates for concrete benches on a distinctly uncomfortable plaza.

Mads Lynnerup’s Reflection (the angle of incidence), with its five mirrors (in another echo of corporate invisibility) and video projection, documents and multiplies a solar cooker being put to use. An usual scene for an urban parking lot, there is something ominous in its narrative. But the initial mystery of the liquid being heated – can it be toxic ? flammable? – is resolved in the surprise of a tea bag. The climax is both sentimental and unsettling.

Baga creates a minor planetarium with her video of, the green light at the end of the dock, channeling F. Scott Fitzgerald alongside a scrolling star show catalog of local personages which renders the community as an inclusive, flickering genealogy.

This latter piece serves as a physical conclusion to the show which opens with an entryway work also created by Baga, and eponymously entitled Ferñañdo. Here, texts crawl in parallel above and below a Chinatown ink drawing redolent of adolescent obsessions and mass produced restaurant calendars. Multiple languages suggest diversity and incomprehension in equal measure, the beginning and the end of the world so inventively depicted in this show, all illuminated by the lights of an imaginary city.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

 Fernando

‘On the Town: Seeing as Only Strangers Can’

Franklin Street Works, 41 Franklin Street, Stamford, CT

Visit the Franklin Street Works site at www.franklinstreetworks.org