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Kehler Liddell Rolls With A Pest Problem

Charlotte Hughes | February 18th, 2022

Kehler Liddell Rolls With A Pest Problem

Kehler Liddell Gallery  |  Arts & Culture  |  Visual Arts  |  Westville  |  Sculpture

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Installation view, Pest Control. Gar Waterman Photos.

The beetles crawl up the walls and across the gallery floor. One has a body covered in shallow pinpricks and antennae almost as long as its abdomen. Another has streamlined stripes running down its oblong body. They lead to its enormous teeth. In all their jagged detail, these beetles made of scrap metal are virtually indestructible.

It's one of the ways Westville-based artist Gar Waterman brings his fascination with the natural world to his metalwork and sculpture. Now through March 13, his beetle sculptures are on view alongside the psychedelic prints of the late William Kent at Kehler Liddell Gallery. The exhibition, fittingly, is titled Pest Control. 

“Bill Kent would have loved this [exhibition] because he had a very sharp, ironic eye about the human race,” Waterman said on a recent walkthrough of the exhibition. He knew Kent for a “couple” years before Kent’s death in 2012. “And the work here, it’s kind of tongue in cheek with a serious side of, you know, what are we doing to the environment?”

Kent, who was hired in 1961 as the curator of the John Slade Ely House in New Haven, developed a technique of printmaking in which he carved sheets of slate to make monoprints on fabric and rice paper. When he died, he left what Waterman called an “incredible” body of work in his farmhouse in Durham, Conn.

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Installation view, Pest Control. Gar Waterman Photos.

One of these pieces is To Whom It May Concern, a print of owls and intricately detailed bugs threatened by their airborne successors–airplanes. The monochrome design is printed on a psychedelic 60s fabric in punchy orange, green, and pink, representing the diversity of natural life against the monotony and homogeneity of modern life. Just as Waterman brings the detailed features of minute beetles to sight, Waterman has brought this print to sight out of its obscurity at Kent’s farmhouse.

To Waterman, it is “wonderful” to see Kent’s work framed in a gallery. Waterman is accustomed, he said, to seeing the paintings in a “completely chaotic and literally falling down place.” 

While Waterman admires prints like Kent’s, he “can’t paint [his] way out of a paper bag.”

Instead, he works with sculpture. He first looks through piles of scrap metal for inspiration— he conceived of this show’s concept when he found a “marvelous” pile of metal stampings that looked like insect legs. To Waterman, that was a moment of “serendipity.”

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Installation view, Pest Control. Gar Waterman Photos.

He wants to show the “incredible intricacies” of these creatures without necessarily presenting a copy of the real thing, he said. After all, the real thing often isn’t visible to the human eye, and Waterman’s beetles are almost a foot tall and take up broad swaths of the floor. Some beetles are hung on the walls, on metal trellises that were industrial plates that Waterman found, in a striking display of nature reclaiming architecture.

“I’m such a cheap Yankee,” Waterman said. “I love the idea of using everything.”

One of the artist's beetles is poised mid-crawl on bottom left side of a reclaimed square steel plate. Covered in a pattern of laser cuts that resemble symmetric leaves, the plate provides an industrial environment for the creature. With its antennas alert, the small, heart-shaped beetle is oddly lifelike, even in hues of metal.

Waterman hopes that guests to Pest Control will consider and protect the earth’s biodiversity, he said. Especially the over 2300 beetle species living in Connecticut. 

“After someone sees the show, maybe they certainly wouldn’t step on the next beetle they see,” he mused.

Pest Control runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through March 13. The gallery is open Thursday and Friday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Learn more at its website