At Kehler Liddell, Artists See Into The Myths Of Time

It’s just a picture of an acorn, but the lens makes all the difference. Under Matthew Garrett’s eye — and, apparently, his phone — the seed becomes a landscape of detail. The bed that it lies on brims with life. It’s a study of an intricate surface we don’t pay attention to very often, but given its subject, it’s also an image about possibility, the chance for vast growth.

It’s a fitting image for ​“Expansion,” a dual show of Garrett’s and fellow artist Amanda Walker’s work, up now at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through April 17. The two artists work in very different ways — Garrett is a photographer, while Walker is a painter — and have very different subject matters. But they’re united in the way they’re both drawn to strong forms and colors, and in (as the title of the show suggests) a sense of energy, of outward-pointed movement.

Garrett’s work arose from moving through the pandemic world in a different way. ​“I rarely picked up a ​‘real’ camera during Covid, but I never put down my phone,” Garrett relates in an accompanying statement. ​“The ever-present camera serves as a notebook for anything and everything that I need to remember, whether that’s a loved one’s face, a shopping list, or an appealing collection of visual shapes and structures.” 

“Early in his career, Garrett’s work centered on finding the structure and form in his daily surroundings, but those formalist bounds loosened over time. Most recently, just by holding and using a different device to make photographs, that initial instinct returned,” the statement continues. ​“These new images celebrate structure (and structures). They compress depth, reveal layers, and feel more succinct than previous efforts.”

“To me, they stand out as the brief, understandable phrase plucked from the din of a crowded event,” Garrett relates.

Garrett’s eye for strong forms is evident in his photographs. He points out the architectural monoliths in our midst, whether they’re office buildings or war memorials, and has a knack for seeing the geometry in infrastructure, like railroad trestles, water towers, power lines, and cranes. But he also finds the symmetry in the leaves of a cactus. He gets deliciously lost in the texture of the inside of an orange. And, in a chance combination of natural and manmade forms, he captures the crisp shadow of an owl against the bright red side of the Eli Whitney Barn. Judging from the work and Garrett’s statement about it, the pandemic was a time of rediscovery, of his own artistic process and the world around him.

Amanda Walker approached her work and the theme of the show from a different perspective, operating at the ​“intersection between intuition and mythology,” an accompanying statement reads. For Walker, ​“expansion … is the result of an ongoing interest in the fluid nature of mythology. I am fascinated by how people explain scientific and metaphysical questions like ​‘how did we get here?’ and ​‘why does a snake shed its skin?’ as well as how those explanations and practices reflect on the storytellers themselves.”

“The myths are often massive and operatic in their scope and creatively inspiring,” she continues. ​“I began to ask myself how I would explain the world if I hadn’t grown up in the solidly Protestant, White, middle-class culture of Texas. How would I view a dark stand of trees, illness, or the destructive nature of humankind?”

The pieces in the exhibit are also a technical departure for Walker, as she moved from watercolors and sewing to painting with acrylics. ​“Working on unprimed canvas, I layer acrylic paint with collaged painted muslin. The raw canvas allows the colors to bleed into one another, not unlike watercolor, and the collage of painted muslin provides both depth and a hard edge,” she relates.

In tapping into the mythological impulse, Walker comes up with some very vivid imagery. As in some of the most striking myths from around the world, she ably rolls enticement and menace together. Her deities bring both order and chaos to the world; they are entities to be allied with if possible, and perhaps feared when not. Perhaps most tantalizing, the images have a way of suggesting a complex cosmology and history without spelling out what it is. We can fill in the meaning for ourselves, or maybe content ourselves with simply not knowing, like we’re visiting a foreign country, but not long enough to understand what’s going on.

But like Garrett’s photographs, Walker’s paintings in the end ask us not to place ourselves in the centers of our worlds, but to understand ourselves as very small parts of a larger whole. There is danger, but also wonder, and maybe with a little observation and a lot of humility, we can have more of the latter than the former.

“Expansion” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through April 17. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.