Artists Have The Magic Touch

The tower is made of small wooden pieces. But as assembled on the floor of Kehler Liddell Gallery, it echoes natural forms, created by ants or bees. Not far away, an abstract piece reveals itself to involve not just pigment, but mirrors, so that the piece changes from every angle you look at it. Not far away, a small sculpture of a figurine in a sled is made, partly, from the shape of a gas mask. 

The pieces represent some of the multitude of artistic transformations in ​“Abracadabra,” a large group show running now at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through Feb. 2.

In U.S. culture the word abracadabra has strong associations with magic shows. We usually hear it coming from the mouths of magicians, or people invoking magicians, pulling rabbits out of hats or coins out of ears. But, as an accompanying text to the show points out, the word is ​“thought to originate from the ancient Aramaic phrase ​‘avra kadabra,’ ” which ​“translates as ​‘I create as I speak.’ ” This brings the crafts of artists and magicians together: What both do can be thought of as acts of illusion, transformation, and creation. 

“Conjuring out of imagination’s thin air is everyday magic for the artist, whose practice also requires an alchemic process unique to each individual as they transform their chosen media into art,” the note continues. As the exhibition is juried, involving 56 artists from Kehler Liddell Gallery members to practitioners from all over the region, it also shows how some of New Haven’s artists fit, quite snugly, into a panoply of artists who, through skill and vision, turn something into something else.

Scott Schuldt’s Phaan in the Red Room features one of the show’s more elaborate material transformations. It reads at first as a digital image, even a scene from an old video game. The space it depicts feels modern. But Schuldt in fact used an ancient method — beadwork — to construct the piece, making something new out of something old in a few different ways.

A few of the pieces acquire additional layers of meaning in the context of the show. Jennifer Knaus’s Ensemble in Orange celebrates a certain fecund imagination in any place. But in a show explicitly about creation and transformation, the piece acquires a narrative; it might invite a viewer to consider the possibility that we see a figure still in the act of creation. Maybe a month before, the headdress was nothing but bare scalp, and in a month’s time, secondary species will have grown to replace the flowers. Maybe we have a few more transformations to go before we reach a steady state. Or maybe they will never end.

Sandra Chase’s Rooster and Friends holds so much chaos that it feels like a piece in the act of creating itself. Like several of the other pieces in the show, its playfulness is also unsettling in just the right way. In Rooster and Friends, the style makes more friendly what might otherwise be a scene out of a horror movie — pipes with teeth, heads and animals shoved into metal fixtures, an unfastened joint overflowing with some unknown substance. What is happening? We don’t know. But Chase’s piece makes it inviting to find out, no matter how messy it is.

Lindsay Suter’s piece, meanwhile, deploys the literal meaning and the magical associations of ​“abracadabra,” playing with perception and creating tension between the terms art and craft. At first glance, Moire Chest is just a fine piece of cherry furniture, until one notices that the knobs on the drawers line up with each other — but not with the drawers. Is it still functional? The decorum of an art gallery prevents us from testing it to find out. But even if the piece were in someone’s bedroom, full of clothes, serving its duty, it will still pose a question. Where does art end and craft begin? Can we even separate them? And what if we open the top drawers and discover not socks, but a flock of doves inside?

“Abracadabra” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Feb. 2. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.