The shingle-covered building on a quiet Scottsville street could easily be mistaken for a home. Until you go inside.

Sculptural furniture --- finished and unfinished --- is everywhere. And the large, cavernous working spaces seem to stretch well beyond the outside walls.

The building houses the studio of Wendell Castle, world-renowned furniture designer-sculptor.

While Wendell works on a new creation in one large room, his wife Nancy Jurs, the well-known ceramist-sculptor, is putting the finishing touches on a large installation piece in another. A third area is occupied by Nancy's son, Bryon Jurs, who has several works in progress.

The three artists, along with Wendell and Nancy's daughter Alison Castle, are getting ready for "Relativity," the first-ever exhibition of work by all four members of the Castle-Jurs family. While Bryon, 44, and Alison, 33, initially explored different directions, both have gravitated to art.

The show, opening Thursday, February 1, at Roberts Wesleyan College's Davidson Gallery, was Nancy's idea. The reason was simple.

"How many families can show together?" she asks.

Participating in an art exhibition with his mother and step-father was the farthest thing from Bryon's mind while he was growing up surrounded by their work.

"I really hated art until I went to college," says Bryon. "I hated art openings and art parties."

But after a few years of college, he says, he had seen one St. Pauli girl poster too many.

"Something snapped in me," he says. "I thought, I've got to have something else around me. I started painting on cardboard boxes and putting things up."

He began taking art courses at Monroe Community College and, eventually, the Rochester Institute of Technology. Influential teachers included Julie Williams and Judd Williams, Kener Bond, and Bruce Sodervick.

Bryon creates reverse paintings, building up colors and textures with polyesters, resins, acrylics, and other materials on the backs of transparent sheets. When these sheets are viewed from the front, the ingredients congeal into abstractions of otherworldly beauty.

His expertise in mixing unusual materials has made him a valuable assistant to Wendell, for whom he works full time, coating furniture in distinctive ways. He constantly experiments with finishes, producing samples for use on Wendell's work and his own.

Juxtapositions of color, shape, and pattern even creep into his dreams at night. "I wake up thinking, Oh my god, what if I drip this into that and spin it?"

Bryon's compositions range from organically shaped abstractions to patterns reminiscent of circuit boards. Some of the most powerful pieces in his studio are un-mounted works he refers to as "skins."

He admires Claus Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and color-field painters, but viewers may see more of a connection to Jackson Pollock in terms of his highly intuitive, spontaneous process.

"I like the physicality of it," says Bryon. "It's not limited to being a two-dimensional medium. I love color, I love materials, I love being able to see how things will interact. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it; I just like doing it. But I always wanted to do something different. I wanted to find my own way of doing things."

After a whole day of working on Wendell's furniture, Bryon often stays at the studio, working late into the night on his own pieces, listening to techno music or Talking Heads albums.

One constant battle is fighting the urge for perfection.

"I'm struggling between that raw art thing and craft," says Bryon. "I've been working for Wendell now for so many years, and I'm so used to getting something finished with no rough edges."

Just around the corner, in the studio's largest space, Wendell is preparing for the Roberts Wesleyan exhibition and two upcoming shows in New York City.

He's carving a bench with organic, curving forms reminiscent of his landmark work of the 1960's. But instead of the wood he was shaping back then, he's carving this piece --- a prototype for a Fiberglas edition --- from urethane foam. He uses the same woodworking tools, but the process goes a lot faster. When he's finished, a mold will be made and the piece will be cast in an edition of 12.

But he's not through with wood. In the Roberts Wesleyan show, Wendell, artist-in-residence at RIT, will exhibit a large seat made of yellow hard wood. It is extraordinarily beautiful material that needs no stain. But, Wendell says, it's nasty wood, terrible to carve.

Another large piece for the show, made of walnut, stained black, has familiar-looking holes cut in it. It's called "Swiss Chaise."

While his one-of-a-kind pieces will eventually go to Demisch Danant, a Chelsea gallery, the edition work will be sold at galleries in New York, London, and Milan.

Talking about his past and future work, Wendell is unusually candid.

"You look back now and then at your work and decide what was important and what wasn't important and why," he says. "It's very clear about certain bodies of work that there was a reason to abandon it. Trompe l'oeil, for example."

Wendell is talking about a popular illusionist phase of his career (in the 1980's), when he meticulously carved items like keys, umbrellas, and coats from a block of wood, as if they were resting on furniture.

"Once you figured out the formula, you'd have a successful trompe l'oeil piece," he says. "For me, the formula was putting a garment of some sort on a very ordinary everyday object that everybody would recognize and feel comfortable with --- nothing there to alert you that something peculiar was going on --- and carve it fairly accurately. But then what's to discover anymore?"

He also feels that his clock phase, which included the magnificent "Ghost Clock" (now in the Smithsonian), had to end. He didn't like depending on the expertise of others to construct clock works.

"After 13 of those I thought, I don't want to do that anymore. One day I said to myself, What would I do if I had no assistants? Well, I knew in a minute what I would do. I'd do this," he says, gesturing toward the organic bench. "This is fun, and I only have assistants so I can get more made. I can do it all. I'm always trying new things, and sometimes they got a fair amount off of what I should have been doing."

Although Wendell is at the very top of the craft world, he has not achieved the same stature in the fine-art world.

"There is very definitely a prejudice against craft media," he says, "but there's another sort of thing happening right now. Media like Fiberglas falls outside [craft], and that's really been the sort of thing that's been my ace in the hole."

"I did Fiberglas work back in the 1960's" he says, "and that's the stuff that's getting acceptance in the art world. The more craft-looking things, like my wooden pieces --- except for the old ones --- the art market's finding those less interesting. They're much more interested in the Fiberglas and metal pieces."

And he has another way of dealing with the prejudice.

"I'm making a very big effort right now to stay away from anything to do with craft," he says, "like refusing to be in shows."

He recently declined to loan anything to a craft show at a California museum. Museum officials got around him by borrowing from another museum. He also turned down a three-person show in Santa Fe because the other two artists work in craft media.

Wendell also sees another category emerging: design as art. It's surfaced at shows like Art Basel, an international exposition held in Miami, and it's attracting an entirely different audience than those who collect craft work. The field is dominated by Europeans.

"I'm the only American that's been able to get into that arena," he says.

Nancy Jurs is no stranger to the art-craft dilemma. She has created some of the most prominent public sculptures in Rochester, including "Triad: Gateway to Rochester," which, until recently, graced a rotunda at the Rochester airport. (Both "Triad" and Wendell's "Lunar Eclipse" clock have become the center of controversy. Airport officials removed Wendell's work to make way for the new security-screening area. And Nancy's sculpture was replaced by a business center.)

Despite Jurs' importance, because her primary medium is clay she has not been taken as seriously as artists working in other media. "There's no reverence for clay," she says, surrounded by her work. "Clay just doesn't cut it in terms of the market. If this were made of glass it would be 200 times more expensive. I'm not enamored of that hierarchy of material. It doesn't make any sense to me at all."

"To me the biggest challenge is to take dirt and make something beautiful out of it," she says. "Glass is beautiful in itself. A slab of wood is a very beautiful thing. A big sheet of bronze, beautiful. But a can of clay --- how awful is that? I think there's a real challenge to that."

Clay will play only a secondary role in one of Nancy's pieces in the Roberts Wesleyan show, where she will display two large installations.

One of them consists of dozens of framed canvases, hanging salon style. And backwards.

Titled "Salon des Refusés," the piece is about bad art.

"We were at a ski lodge at Anderson Ranch in Colorado this summer and stayed in this place that hadn't been updated since 1962," says Nancy. "Lying in bed, looking at the walls, I said, I can't sleep in this room. I can't deal with this art. I got up and turned the darn thing around. And you know what? The back was interesting. So I went and turned all the other paintings around. I got off on the fact that there's all this hidden beauty back there."

Back home, Nancy turned to a pile of old canvases, collected over the years from garage sales and Goodwill stores.

"I've been collecting objects for 35 years," she says. "I've gotten really inspired by the idea of taking something that's no longer living in its past life and renewing it."

Beyond recycling objects, she finds philosophical implications in her recent work.

"The whole idea of breathing new life into things --- you can always turn your life around," she says. "It's about keeping life going, not ever giving up on it. You can always find a way."

Last year Nancy had a one-person show at Roberts Wesleyan, involving found objects, called "Gatherings." Her second piece in the upcoming show, "Déjà vu,"will carry on that theme with a new twist. It's a gathering of her life.

The piece grew out of an idea that's been floating around in her head for several years. She plans, at some point, to mount a retrospective of her career called "40/40." The show would consist of 40 pieces, one from each year for 40 years.

"Déjà vu" is a variation of that idea. In this installation, coming together in another studio attached to the family home, pieces spanning 45 years will be painted white (with washable tempera paint) and placed in a parlor-like setting.

The piece centers around an old mantel that she found. Her "goddess" pieces will stand between several columns. A coffee table will be set for tea with dinnerware Nancy made as a student at RIT in 1963. Elsewhere, there will be chairs and tables made of tree trunks.

Kimonos, garment pieces, her entire artistic oeuvre is scattered around the studio awaiting placement in the installation. Even the maquettes for her airport sculpture, gorgeous clay pieces about a foot high, will be painted white and used as logs in the fireplace.

While "Déjà vu" is primarily a conceptual piece, it consists of many clay objects.

"I think what's interesting is to bridge that," says Nancy. "I'm actually doing a sculpture installation with things from my craft life. I just don't know who the heck I am anymore. I'm just into it; I'm just going for it. There will be my whole career wrapped up in a room. You'll feel like you've been invited to have a cup of tea."

If the conflict between art and craft is a central issue to Wendell, Nancy, and Bryon, it is not an issue in Alison's work.

She majored in philosophy at Columbia University and, after graduating, studied sculpture and photography in a masters program at New York University. All three areas merge in her work.

"I was interested in creative writing and photography as a teenager," writes Alison by e-mail from Paris, "but Columbia didn't offer a major in either, so I chose philosophy instead. It was wonderful. I never stopped writing and taking pictures, despite choosing that as a major."

After meeting her future husband, who is French, in New York, Alison moved with him to Paris in 1999.

In her three pieces for the Roberts Wesleyan exhibit, notes typed and written on a small pad are blown up and printed digitally. Hanging from a wall in the studio, the thick, curling surface becomes a sort of sculptural photography, but the content --- words on a page --- is almost entirely conceptual.

On one piece are the words (crossed out with a curvy red line but still readable): "Another Gem From the ‘It's My Prerogative' Series."

Several lines down, in large typed letters, are more words: "Shall I take pictures of people (strangers) while they're sleeping, or is that ‘not OK'?"

And at the bottom are hand-written notes:

"Not OK. OK? OK."

In this format, the notes are raised to a level of importance that paradoxically contradicts their fleeting-thought quality.

Even though her pieces are highly conceptual, Alison takes an intuitive approach to them.

"I do a lot of doodling and scribbling down things in notebooks, and over the years the little pieces have evolved into these works," she says.

When she is not making art, Alison works as an editor at one of the most high-end book publishers in the world: Taschen books. She has edited projects like "Some Like It Hot," a lavish coffee-table book exploring the Marilyn Monroe movie, and an even more extravagant book, "The Stanley Kubrick Archives," examining the work of the great director.

She loves her job. "Making a book like ‘Kubrick' is intensely rewarding," she says, "because I had a creative vision that I was able to follow through to the final product."

Her work doesn't appear to be influenced by her parents' work in any way, so viewers may wonder if growing up in a household with Wendell and Nancy had an impact.

"Massive!" writes Alison. "Being surrounded by art and artists absolutely defined my childhood and youth. I have no idea what kind of person I'd be if I'd grown up around lawyers or mathematicians."

"Relativity," an exhibition of work by the Castle-Jurs family, opens February 1 and continues through March 15 at Davidson Gallery, Roberts Wesleyan College, 2301 Westside Drive. A free reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. Saturday, February 3, with a conversation with Wendell Castle, Nancy Jurs, and Bryon Jurs at 5:30.