Studio Route 29 is both a project space and art studio based in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Since 2022, SR29 has provided a wide range of artistic support to artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the surrounding community. “Said I Should Have Stayed at the Museum Counting Fish Scales” is a group exhibition at 47 Canal, and takes its name from a work by Studio artist Michael Angelo Mangino. Featuring works by six artists, this exhibition provides a peek into the various practices supported at SR29.

BJ Armour Jr.'s drawings emerge in fluid connection with his dream world, a capacious and constant place-beyond that aids in digesting the artist’s here and now. The artworks, like dreams, bring together unexpected people and things, in transformation and collision, joy and tragedy, humor and fantasy, funneled through Armour Jr.'s atmospheric mark making and notation. Armour Jr.'s Aunt Beverly is a primary muse, and she is often depicted in his work as a shapeshifter - Aunt Beverly as a princess, a playing card, or a traffic cone.

Bill Eppinger’s works on paper are translations of messages he receives from God. Encountering them is to come into contact with a system of meaning just beyond access yet inviting of interpretation. Part of Eppinger’s practice takes place at home, in 8.5 x 11 inch spiral bound journals, sections of which are on display here. In the humble language of the office supply Bic pens and highlighters he favors, often traced around household objects or his own body, Eppinger catalogs an ongoing connection to the divine.

With a formalism of his own devising and developing, Michael Angelo Mangino’s painting brings us to sensation, to proximity, to a possibility of and question about autonomy and capacity in Painting. Mangino’s work emerges independently from the history of painterly abstraction; it is a vital new contribution to that historical conversation. While Mangino does not generally speak or write to communicate, text appears in his artwork. In this series, Mangino collages together fragments from various sources to form short, playful, and prescient poems atop abstract paintings on paper.

In her highly chromatic depictions of the condominium she lives in, surrounded by friends, flowers, and trees, Bernadette Simone coalesces her most cherished spaces, feelings, and ways of living into repeated symbols, all rendered in the glow of “forever” (a tense that's very important to her). In her textile work it is as though her condo is floating in color, a refuge. Outside, life is wild and varied, sometimes stormy and sometimes fair.

Karyn Tettemer’s florals, painted after historical still lives, are connected with a long tradition of painterly attention, and to the way markmaking approximates and expands on the life depicted. In a style she refers to as “antique,” Tettemer offers a careful and loving interpretation of her references, from the art historical to beloved moments and figures from her personal life. Here, Tettemer brings us thoughtfully constructed paintings that integrate a sense of calm with the activity of her color and tipped up perspectives.

Christian Turner’s assemblage sculpture is an extended performative construction project bringing into dimensionality a mashed up world where characters from contemporary movies and cartoons play alongside fantastic imagined episodes of Turner’s life. In playful and irreverent relationship to material, Turner cobbles together an excitedly undelineated and speculative sculptural utopia that graciously and generously hosts his goofs and spoofs, his sudden turns of thought and delight. Anything and anyone can be anything here, and pathways of meaning split and meander unconcernedly across time, space, and horizon.