Kehler Liddell Gallery | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts
| Tom Edwards at Kehler Liddell. His exhibition Dreams and Shadows and Gar Waterman's A Pattern Language run through March 15 at the Westville Gallery. Jamiah Green Photos; all artwork by Tom Edwards and Gar Waterman. |
A dragon holds the end of a tree branch with an owl sitting still on top. A black-spotted cheetah sits on a cloud above it; a snail perches on the tree trunk below. The wing of a moth rests above the head of a fish.
Nearby, a mixture of pine, mahogany, and paint have been assembled to build a sort of mask, created in rectangles, triangles and circles.
These details, which talk endlessly to each other, come from Gar Waterman’s A Pattern Language and Tom Edwards’ Dreams and Shadows, two new exhibitions at Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue. The shows, which work best in conversation with each other, run at the gallery now through March 15.
Together, they layer past, present and future. In A Pattern Language, Waterman has found and used a number of wooden foundry patterns from the once-vibrant National Pipe Bending Company (NPBC), which was active on River Street in the city's Fair Haven neighborhood from the mid nineteenth century until it was closed in the 1980s.
“Patterns were a key part of the cast iron production process, but orphaned by changing times and the exodus of manufacturing from the New England landscape,” a text that accompanies the exhibition reads. “When NPBC closed, the company abandoned the building and left behind a stash of patterns in the attic.”
Except for Waterman, they weren’t just patterns. They were also art objects.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” he said at an artist talk Saturday afternoon.
The works are enough to pull the viewer in and keep them looking for a while. In Talking Head, a face emerges in circles and rectangles made of pine, some bits of mahogany, and paint. Half cylinders and triangles create the structure of its nose and chin. From the wall, it almost comes alive and whispers.
Two other pieces reference a dart board, and are as interesting to look at for their differences as they are for their similarities. One is created with big circles of pine wood and two small circles of mahogany.
The other is made with circles and oval-half shapes of pine wood, a medium-size circle of dark wood in its center, and smaller pieces of wood. Three small screws are spread across the top of the structure.
The work relies heavily on what Waterman has been able to find, salvage, and puzzle together, meaning that the pieces fuse found art with the artist’s carefully trained, sculptural eye. They're wildly different than the sleek, hard-hitting deep sea creatures he presented in Canaries In A Blue Coal Mine at the gallery in 2018.
“With this particular body of work, the process is really just putting together the pieces that I find,” Waterman said Saturday. “I’m not manipulating it at all, just figuring out what pieces can go together. This is quite different then what I normally do.”
Edwards’ work, which is totally different in tone, fits right into a dialogue. In the works on display at Kehler Liddell, he writes that his primary concern is “the visual development of images that describe dream-related memory and a nocturnal atmosphere.”
In his Wings and Feathers, a simple wooden panel has been transformed into a thick, hinged triptych with a brown-black background, on which shadows dance and emerge from the darkness. On the front, feathers float in space, bookended by two types of wings. Each contains a different pattern and texture; each is equally surreal.
Another piece, Shadow Gallery, starts with the same sort of structured panel. Inside, the viewer is greeted by a muddy mixture of dark and light greens that swirl together. A small, rectangular piece connects the ends of the panel, creating a shadow across the image. Several shaded triangles turn into what look like mysterious tents. Or maybe they’re mountains. Or trees.
Edwards also has a sense of humor (he's been painting since 1975, so he's had time to hone it) and pairs it with bright imagery and experiment. In Siena + 17 Contrade—as in, the Italian city and also the name of his dog— he has switched up setting and tone. His own Siena—Siena the pup—appears at the lower left hand corner of the work.
“The 17 other animals and objects are all symbolic, or all the symbols, that are attached to the 17 districts of Siena,” he continued. “It’s a story-picture from the Siena point of view.”
Each piece takes about 18 months from start to finish, he said. While each has a similar process, he added, the imagery changes with each work.
Gar Waterman’s A Pattern Language and Tom Edwards’ Dreams and Shadows both run through March 15, 2020. Kehler Liddell Gallery is located at 873 Whalley Ave. in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood. For hours and more information, visit its website.