By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—It seems as if every Vermont town has an art gallery where you can buy paintings of Holsteins and haystacks. While lovely, however, the bucolic ain’t everyone’s cup of tea. If you like your art with a darker edge, check out the superlatively weird offerings at A Twisted Little Gallery (ATLG) in downtown Brandon.
Founded on Carver Street by Jamie Ruggerio 11 years ago, ATLG has recently undergone a major transformation and reopened in the carriage house of the property (the gallery was formerly in a section of the main house). The space is chock full of bizarre, unusual, unexpected, and just plain freaky art, objects, and cards. Nothing graphic or obscene, just work that deviates from the mainstream you’ll find in other Vermont galleries.
“I wanted it to be the kind of place where you can come in and spend hours looking at everything,” said Ruggerio in a recent conversation at the gallery. Ruggerio shows original artwork, unique vintage objects culled from estate sales, material related to the holy trinity of nerd genres (sci-fi, fantasy, and horror), and glass artwork that he produces himself in the studio attached to the retail space.
Ruggerio has been working with glass for 25 years or so, having learned the craft down in Maryland, where he’d drive 1.5 hours each way to be able to spend a few hours in a glass studio. But he caught the glass bug, despite the many challenges glass artists face: it’s expensive, it requires a lot of equipment, and it can be physically painful.
“You have to enjoy hurting,” he laughed, recounting a time when he was working with such intense heat that a brass necklace he was wearing burned his chest. Over the years, he’s moved away from furnace work to the more manageable demands of lampwork, where the glass is manipulated with handheld torches at a workbench. The quality of the work is not diminished, however.
“I strive for mastery of the medium,” he said. “People often think my work is done in a furnace.”
Because of the type of market ATLG serves, Ruggerio makes a lot of small glass objects, such as colorful Christmas ornaments or flawless clear orbs with colored patterns suspended in the solid glass, that folks feel comfortable snapping up on a whim. But even those, he says, take a surprising amount of skill to produce well. Glass is finicky and it takes years of practice to learn how to bend it to one’s will.
Ruggerio’s glass studio is adjacent to the retail space and large windows allow customers to watch him at work. He’s even willing to give one-on-one lessons to anyone interested in learning the basics of the craft.
But the majority of the gallery is given over to the brazenly bizarre art and objects that prompted Ruggerio to call the place “twisted.”
There are fantastic 3-D sculptures based on molds of animal carcasses, painted to look like exposed muscle and veins. There’s artwork based on beloved genre movies and characters. He once had a large painting of Winona Ryder’s character in Beetlejuice that he ended up missing after someone bought it. The display cases are filled with all sorts of unique knick-knacks, priced so that chances are someone looking for something strange won’t have to leave emptyhanded. Even if all you need is a greeting card, ATLG has an edgy selection you’re not likely to find anywhere else.
In the early days of the gallery, Ruggerio says folks were a little apprehensive about coming in, unsure whether it was a store or a museum of oddities. But over the years, he’s developed a reputation in the area.
“No one around here has anywhere to go for just weirdness,” he said. Or for conversation about alternative spirituality, sci-fi movies, fantasy novels, or a slew of other arcane topics that Ruggerio is fluent in.
So, if you’re into the “twisted” and unexpected, drop in and have a look. Jamie is happy to talk to you about his work and his wares.
The gallery is open Thursday 1:30 to 5 p.m., Friday 1 to 5 p.m., Saturday 1 to 5 p.m., and by appointment. You can contact the gallery at alittletwistedgallery@gmail.com or (802) 465-1661.
