'Everyday Perfection' on display at airport gallery

What does a saffron yellow room with a row of wooden pegs around the perimeter by Amie Cunat have in common with some half-finished textile fragments peppered with staples by Elana Herzog? The Shakers. Likewise with a latex drawing of a double staircase by Matt LaFleur and a 19th century wooden box full of spools by the Shakers themselves.

"Everyday Perfection" is the new Albany International Airport Gallery show of art inspired by the Shakers. It creates overlapping associations and beautiful symmetries from one century to the next, with curator Kathy Greenwood focusing especially on the influence of Shaker fabrics and their ornamental designs.

Sometimes, literal (and maybe unquestioning) responses get changed up with scale and materials. The luminous giant white bonnet in the stairwell by Kate Hamilton hovers like a cheerful phantom, the nylon fabric catching both the light and the air. The aluminum mesh in Hamilton's grouping of life-size bonnets makes them gleam as they turn slightly like a serene and vaguely ominous mobile.

Laura Kaufman updates tradition in more abstract (and obscure) ways. Three plaid patterns made by transferring pigment to paper in careful, repeated short lines reach beyond decoration, the overlapping vertical and horizontal colors interrupted by small, repeating gaps. The origins of these are what the curator calls "systems of language" that come from scientific texts about the origins of dark matter — a 21st century equivalent of the spiritually incomprehensible.

One of the strengths of "Everyday Perfection" is how it goes beyond superficial relationships of pattern and textile-based organization of surface. There are some original Shaker artifacts here, carefully behind Plexiglas, and they remind us that there is an inner logic and intuition within the pre-modernist elegance that...