Photographers Create Shadow Plays

Mark K. St. Mary’s Study #1108 looks almost like it could be a double exposure, an image of light and shadow laid over a photograph of a hallway. Viewed another way, it can feel almost intrusive, a view from inside a house at night when the lights are off. Should we, the viewers, be there? What is going on?

Study #1108 is part of ​“Lost in the Shadows,” an exhibition of photographs by Mark K. St. Mary, alongside ​“Hindsight,” a show of Matthew Garrett photographs, both running at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through April 14. The two artists use their cameras to different but equally effective ends.

In St. Mary’s case, his camera allows him to make the best of a bad situation. ​“Light pollution becomes a window to another world,” he writes in an accompanying statement. ​“There are large security lights in a commercial parking lot behind my house. They are bright and annoying and out of my control. I found my frustration shifting to fascination as I noticed the shadow world they created. I became intrigued by both the fractal-like effect the lights have on fine lines and the split images created from more substantial objects, such as plants, structures, and my own body.”

“I want to share that fascination with you,” St. Mary concludes. ​“The works in this exhibition portray this world of shadows exactly as those lights revealed them. Come lose yourself in the shadows with me.”

The exhibition details just how varied these shadows can be. Some of the images are, in effect, abstracts, lattices of light and shadow cast on an ambiguous surface. Others feature the outlines of plants, as if flickering there from a projector. Still others feature the photographer himself, looking as much a part of the landscape as anything and yet flipping the meaning of the image inside out; St. Mary puts us directly in his shoes. We are in his house, but, it turns out, not intruding. We’re invited guests, as St. Mary’s statement clarifies. The light itself is the intruder, even though it makes the photos possible.

If St. Mary’s photographs have a stolen, informal quality to them, Matthew Garrett’s photos are exercises in rigorous structure. ​“For the last 20+ years I’ve worked and exhibited almost exclusively in color,” Garrett writes in an accompanying statement. ​“The images you see here are a reinvestigation of the preceding 15 years of my work in black and white, looking for what was missed at the time.” He notes that ​“with one or two exceptions, none of these images have ever been printed or down before and all of the prints are newly made by digitizing the original negatives.” 

It’s often said that many photographers prefer shooting in black and white because the absence of color allows for greater concentration on form, geometry, and texture. Garrett’s photos lean hard into these elements, producing photos that reward spending time with them. Garrett finds the strict symmetry in an empty pool and shrubbery, the complex shadows in a picture of a person resting beneath a plane wing. The grass in a couple of photographs shimmers. But Garrett excels most, perhaps, at creating a sense of vast, blank space, when he makes his subjects small, seemingly pitting them against the open sky. Shelter II deploys this to moving effect. It’s lonely, and also perhaps a little funny for it. With the car’s crisp outlines against the fading valley and the horizon, to almost a comical degree, there is no place to hide.

“Hindsight” and ​“Lost in the Shadows” run at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through April 14. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.