Sunday reception for photography show at Kehler Liddell

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Seven: An Exhibition by Seven Photographers
Oct. 13—Nov. 13, 2011.
Opening Reception: Sun., Oct. 16, 3—6 p.m.

Press release

Kehler Liddell Gallery is pleased to present Seven, a group show by seven photographic artists. Featuring the work of Rod Cook, Matthew Garrett, Andrew Hogan, Keith Johnson, Hank Paper, Alan Shulik, and Marjorie Wolfe, this unique exhibition is a testament to the diversity of styles and esthetics within the photographic medium. The diverse methods used by the seven artists include Platinum palladium process, multiple image printing and photojournalism.

Rod Cookʼs photographs offer rare moments of surreal beauty. Each image is a glimpse into an intimate gesture—sometimes haunting, other times reminiscent of a comforting memory. Using the Platinum/Palladium process—a technical process in which a light sensitive emulsion is coated directly on the surface of a sheet of paper—Cookʼs photographs exhibit a stunning, soft luminosity that evoke a deep emotional response within the viewer.

Matthew Garrett is a photographer who extracts uncanny and strange images from urban and suburban environments. His photographs isolate murmurs from the rhythms of our daily surroundings. Garrett transforms familiar spaces into mysterious, meditative spaces. His compositions play with light intensity and utilize spatial juxtapositions to create signature, dramatic visual effects.

Andrew Hogan's photographs capture fleeting moments of emotion that are indefinable by words alone: Mere glimpses or gestures that can suggest an entire life story. His photographs reveal fleeting moments of personal history and their underlying emotions that are undiminished by time. Hogan captures these powerful emotional stories in their beauty and mystery. His images uncover what is hidden in our everyday lives, and show how time and distance affect our personal realities and perceptions.

Keith Johnson makes photographs that are an investigation of extended imagery. By printing multiple images on a single piece of paper, Johnson is able to push the photograph beyond the single print, into a grid work that creates new frames and connections between images. The juxtaposition of multiple pictures steers the viewerʼs focus to the idea of the image—toward the imageʼs string of potential suggested by layers of graphic detail.

Hank Paperʼs photographs are from a series entitled “Island Life.” Paper shoots in an intuitive, photojournalistic style that allows the true nature of his subjects to be seen, often in juxtaposition with their absurd nature. Paperʼs photographs can be viewed as testimonies of people in their everyday life. However, his often humorous images do more than just expose the ordinary. They puncture the viewerʼs preconceived notions of his fellow man by revealing his subjects in unexpected roles and contexts that both surprise and sometimes astonish.

Alan Shulik (see image) paints with the lens of the camera in such a way as to produce abstract-surrealist images that conjure up ethereal, dream-like experiences. The images he will exhibit in this show are landscape photographs depicting the coastlines of Maine and Connecticut. Possessing a quiet, ethereal quality, these images are at once fleeting glances and moments of stillness.

Marjorie Wolfeʼs approach to photography, though simple and direct, reveals a hidden world. Wolfeʼs photographs were all taken at the same pond in Marthaʼs Vineyard, a place that the artist visits often. However, despite familiarity with the location, through Wolfeʼs sensitive visual esthetic, she is able to use the camera to expose the subtle contrasts around her—near and far, old and young, clamor and peace.

Sunday opening of sculpture and photo show at Kehler Liddell

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Gar Waterman & Marjorie Gillette Wolfe: Coruscations and Cotyledons
Apr. 14—May 15, 2011
Opening Reception: Sun., Apr. 17, 3-6 p.m., Artists' talk: 3:30 p.m.

Press release

Kehler Liddell Gallery is very pleased to present Coruscations and Cotyledons, a two-person exhibition of sculpture by Gar Waterman and photographs by Marjorie Gillette Wolfe. The two visuals at play—coruscations, sudden flashes of light, and cotyledons,leaves of the embryo of a seed plant—engage in conversations about the discrete phenomena that shape our environment and inform our aesthetic experience.

Delicate, close observation on the part of both artists manifests in works that explore the relationship between architecture and science. Watermanʼs magnified cotyledon sculptures investigate the exquisite physicality and intricacies of plant forms and respond to their architectural components—balance, strength, geometry, perfection, pattern, mechanisms of defense and attraction. Wolfeʼs photographs document isolated shots of real places where natural light backlights, screens and mixes with architectural elements—buttresses, plastic siding and weathered glass, in series of environments that read like abstract paintings. Shared appreciations for the structure of nature unites the two distinct bodies of work, both characterized by natural palettes, and allow the viewer to move thoughtfully through moments of soft and hard texture and form.

Watermanʼs sculptures represent a fundamental dialogue between architecture and nature, which is his primary source of inspiration. In addition to wood, Waterman works in stone, bronze, glass and steel. His imagery ranges from plant life, marine forms and insects to imagined figures.

Waterman grew up in New Jersey and Maine, with a formative year in Tahiti at age 10, where his father, underwater filmmaker Stan Waterman, shot and produced a documentary for National Geographic. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Waterman moved to Pietrasanta Italy, where he studied for seven years to become a master stone carver. Waterman currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut and Sargentville, Maine.

Wolfeʼs photographs investigate the abstraction of real space and ephemeral elements. For this show she will focus on the way diptychs, triptychs and larger series of photographs inform one another. In addition to her abstract series, Wolfe will present traditional landscapes that confound perspective and facilitate the viewerʼs reconsideration of a well-worn subject.

Show opening at Kehler Liddell on Sunday

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Overtones Undertones: Blinn Jacobs & Marjorie Wolfe
Through Dec. 6, 2009
Artists' Reception: Sun., Nov. 8, 3—6 p.m.
Artists' Talk: Sun., Nov. 15, 2:30 p.m.

Press release

Tone, transparency, texture, color, geometry—these are apparent elements in the paintings of Blinn Jacobs and photographs of Marjorie Wolfe.

Blinn Jacobs' monochromatic surfaces are overtones of color that give way to undertones of barely visible incised lines. Whether a single work or presented in series, the colors and lines reverberate. There is both depth and delicacy to this tension of color and line. This exhibit features a new square painting series that builds off earlier honeycomb cardboard "drawings." In the cardboard works, the surface reveals the properties inherent in the material, while in her paintings the linear structure is wholly created.

Jacob's began this series during a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the spring of 2009, her 5th residency, and notes she has gone each time with a concept in mind yet is always influenced by the surrounding seasonal landscape.

Marjorie Wolfe presents several groupings of photographs. Prominent are her greenhouses, a subject Wolfe has been working with for over 15 years. The newest compositions in this series include multiple images within a frame, a reconfiguration of many sites. Overtones of mystery and curiosity permeate as the greenhouse materials become an unrecognizable, abstract subject.

Other groupings continue to play off multiples and comprise a variety of objects with an emphasis on similarity of shapes, colors and subjects such as manhole covers, trees, or built structures.

Wolfe's photographs share a formalistic compositional coherence. It is evidence of her studied and deliberate—yet slightly skewed—view of the world. Overtones and undertones happen simultaneously as her photographs move near and far, sharp then out of focus, abstract to the familiar.

The resulting Overtones Undertones exhibition is a quietly intellectual and vividly visual continuum from both artists, expressing their specific and unique interests in repetition, abstraction, and inspiration.

There will be an artists' reception this Sun., Nov. 8, from 3—6 p.m. and an artists' talk the following Sun., Nov. 15, at 2:30 p.m.

Israel through two pairs of eyes

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Israel at 60: Time and Diversity
Apr. 3—27, 2008

Two photographers, two different but not unrelated takes on the same subject. In this case, photographers Hank Paper and Marjorie Wolfe are showing images shot in Israel at the Kehler Liddell Gallery. Ostensibly marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel, the show eschews the political controversies swirling around the Middle East for a couple of personal travelogues.

Paper is gifted at the art of street photography. (In an objectivity alert, I work for Hank Paper at Best Video in Hamden.) He has a strong intuition for seeing telling juxtapositions, amusing correlations and compositional complementarities. There are numerous examples of this among his images in this show. It's noticeable in his first picture, entitled "Palms." On first look, the picture seems to be just a shot of a couple of young women on a pool deck in the foreground leading a group of people in the pool in water aerobics. It is the second glance that is the hook. The two women have their arms raised in "V"s-a stance mirrored by two large palm trees in the background. Their long fronds arch up from the trunk.

This show isn't about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But its presence is implicitly felt in several of Paper's images. In "Love Not War," a male and female soldier in fatigues gaze joyfully into each other's eyes. The conflict is there in the image of two soldiers, backs to the camera and guns slung over their shoulders, among the four people at the Wailing Wall ("Four Figures at the Wailing Wall.")

Throughout his shots is a running theme of the tension between, or the coexistence of, the ancient and the modern. This angle is present in the aforementioned "Four Figures at the Wailing Wall": an Orthodox man in traditional dress black suit and hat is seated facing the ancient wall in a molded white plastic chair. It is represented in images that capture people in modern dress with, primarily, men in the raiments of the Orthodox.

This tension is also evident in the architecture and is captured metaphorically in the large image "World of Spices." In this image, brightly colored plastic trays—purple, yellow, red—display mounds of powdered spices for sale. Heaped in the modern plastic containers, the spices (shades of gold, brown, orange, red and gray) look like ancient colored sands. From the lower left corner, a hand reaches in toward one of the containers. The purple in the sleeve of the sweater complements the color of the container. The weathered hand reinforces the evocation of antiquity. The impact of "World of Spices" is heightened by its display below "Jordanian Night Clerk, Haifa." This image is of an ultra-modern hotel reception desk with a background of rich, almost blacklight-glowing purple. The design diagonals around the desk echo the diagonals marked by the edges of the spice bins.

Paper's stock-in-trade is as a street photographer, capturing snapshots that rise to the level of art. His technique is strong enough to serve the power of his images but it isn’t that of a master photographer. Marjorie Wolfe, on the other hand, is well-schooled in photographic technique. As she notes in her artist statement, in Israel she worked differently from her usual method, which is to photograph "slowly, precisely and formally." Notwithstanding her self-conscious attempt to adopt more of a street photography approach, her images are notably more formalistic than Paper's. Details are sharp and subjects appear to have been chosen more for their compositional coherence.

About half of her photos are in color, a departure for Wolfe, who has long worked primarily in black and white. She approaches the addition of color to her imagery much as a chef might experiment with adding a new seasoning to a cuisine—starting with a pinch and not a tablespoon. As an example, the decrepit peeling building wall in "Façade" is mostly monochromatic. Exposed gray concrete, chips of white, stained beige paint. But catching the eye are the three window frames, painted in bright turquoise.

Texture and architecture take precedence in Wolfe's images over figures. There is a particularly beautiful black and white image of the ruins at Masada ("Ruin, Masada"). The crumbling stone wall curves around, the left side embedded with geometric curves and lines of mosaic. In the right center there is one arched open window space. Through this opening and above the walls one looks out into a cloudless sky, its silken spotlessness a contrast to the hard-won cragginess of the ancient architecture.