Artists Bend Time’s Arrow

In Sean Patrick Gallagher’s series of paintings, the sea roils red. The image is clear enough, but the title brings home the allusions the artist is leaning toward. ​“Wine-dark,” the famous moniker for the ocean in Homer’s classical Greek epics. The others are more contemporary, pointing to the effects of climate change. The series of paintings together act almost like a film. Move through the gallery fast enough, and the floor might feel like it’s surging beneath your feet.

Gallagher’s paintings are part of ​“The Falling and the Rising,” a show of his work paired with artist Tom Edwards’ show, ​“Observations and Obsessions,” both running at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through May 19. Though the artists differ in their formal execution, in their shows they share a common goal of making the viewer acutely aware of time, and the paradox of how, sometimes, it can seem to move both slower and faster at once — to devastating effect.

An accompanying note states that the series of paintings making up ​“These Wine-Dark, Warming Currents, Rising … displays no horizon or land beyond the vast, red waters.” Beyond the reference to Homer, the phrase is intended as ​“an ominous metaphor for contemporary climate change and political currents.” That there’s no horizon contributes to the paintings’ vertiginous effect; there’s nothing for the eye to settle on, and no land, no harbor, in sight. 

But Gallagher deploys a similar approach in Near the End, They Really Did Shine, a series of gauzy paintings of trees in fall intended as ​“a metaphor for what one can create at the end of a duration. The chosen trees were depicted from Stanley Quarter Park, in New Britain, next to Central Connecticut State University,” where Gallagher teaches. ​“That park contains memories of loved ones and students, drawing, conversing, and laughing, including several whom he never saw again, shortly after they departed.” In the paintings of the waves, one terrifying moment can seem to last forever; in the paintings of foliage, years of memories can collapse into a single instant.

That same sense of time as changeable, flexible, strange, appears in Tom Edwards’s drawings. They have an energy to them, a sense of freewheeling form, that might give the impression that they were made quickly. It turns out the opposite is true. An accompanying note explains: ​“Consisting of only ink on paper, Tom Edwards’ work in ​‘Observations and Obsessions’ spans from 1975 to 2024. Several of the recently completed drawings in the exhibit were begun, stored, forgotten, and then found and reworked to their present state in 2023. The development of the ​‘time-extended’ drawings required that the initial ​‘observed image’ be reconstructed and completed through visual memories that alter the concepts of time and space within the resulting drawing.” Where Gallagher alludes to the collapsing of time, many of Edwards’s pieces explicitly illustrate it.

“I rarely consider my drawings ​‘finished’ but rather ​‘works in progress,’ ” Edwards is quoted as saying. Illustrating the passage of time can feel mystical: ​“Dark matter invading the open spaces reflects the organic energy of the universe,” Edwards says. But his work ends up meeting Gallagher’s again in two drawings he makes of a fence in a yard. The physical details are all the same: the slats in the fence, the foliage nearby. But the shapes of the shadows are so different that, at first, they don’t look like the same place. Were the drawings made at different times in the same day, or were they made years apart? It doesn’t matter. The light and the passage of time transform everything, whether the difference is five decades or just a few hours.

“The Falling and the Rising” and ​“Observations and Obsessions” are running at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through May 19. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.