There's a conceptual savvy to the works of Andrea Alvin's "Dime Store Dreams" paintings, currently on view at the Mark Gruber Gallery in New Paltz, that's reminiscent of the successes former Gruber artist Will Cotton has had with his giant Candyland and Varga Girl works of recent years, or Portia Munson's portraits of banal homebound objects. By working her painterly powers on anachronistic toy guns and sweets - things cherished in middle-aged memories - she's able to wrap enough nostalgic value into her works to give them a hint of postmodern currency, given added oomph by her strong compositions, her style located somewhere between a 19th-century Impressionism and more modern Photorealism.

Gruber, one of the stalwart pioneers of the regional gallery scene who has become better-known, at least saleswise, for his showing of neo-Luminist regional landscapes and old-style still lifes, is ecstatic about being able to introduce Alvin to local collectors and connoisseurs. It's her treatment of light that he loves.

California-born and raised, with a degree from the renowned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Alvin and her noted illustrator husband/partner John are recent transplants to the area, excited about breaking from a Hollywoodcentric business that saw them creating numerous film ad campaign posters to the more fine-art-centered world of New York City. The current Gruber show represents her breakthrough East Coast debut after years of success out West.

"I love the idea of everyday objects or products, taken beyond the magazine, billboard or TV ad and lovingly glorified and idealized," she has said of her concentration on postwar, Baby Boomer, middle-class American Oreo cookies, Necco Wafers and other iconic items, all humanized through consumptive evidence: a bite here, a spill there... "The final effect is intensely personal to the viewer and yet broadly reminiscent of an era that binds us irrevocably together... Postmodern, by definition, reacts against earlier Modernist principles by reintroducing the traditional and upending its status quo."

The show, at Gruber's gallery in the New Paltz Plaza on the Route 299 entry into town from the Thruway, will be up through June 2. For further information, visit www.markgrubergallery.com or www.andreaalvin.com or call (845) 255-1241.