At Kehler Liddell Gallery, Artists Unsettle For A Purpose

The baby in the middle of the image might just be a doll, but in the photograph it seems as though it’s been brought strangely to life. Is it a ruler, looking out over its broken domain? A performer playing for a mute audience? A judge passing down a verdict to the condemned? It’s an image that overflows with a sense that we’re looking into another world, adjacent to ours but darker and stranger, made up of the things we thought we threw out. Something’s coming from that world into ours, and maybe we’re both frightened and fascinated to find out what it is.

The piece is part of a dual show at Kehler Liddell Gallery, ​“Parker/Wilton,” featuring sculptures by Robert Parker and photographs by R.F. Wilton, and ​“Circumnavigation,” featuring works by Brian Flinn. The entire show — which runs until Nov. 28 — can be considered an exercise in what Wilton called ​“passive collaboration.” He used the phrase to describe the photographs in his half of the show, but the concept also encompasses the common threads between his work and that of Flinn’s. The artists all a share a sense of balancing darker and lighter elements — of being willing to make a viewer not entirely at ease, and tipping toward the absurd — in ways that make the entire show more than the sum of its parts.

“Parker/Wilton” is so named because the photographs, in one sense, feature the work of sculptor Robert Parker, who, Wilton related, has created a complex set of pieces on his property in Guilford. ​“There are probably 1,000 pieces in a very small space,” Wilton said, and Parker created them by and for himself. ​“Bob just constructs his things on his own, at his own pleasure,” Wilton said. ​“He doesn’t have an interest in promoting his work, or putting it in an installation. His artwork is his own endeavor. He even keeps it fenced off from the road.” 

That’s just one way that Wilton connects with Parker; ​“I’ve been that way as well with my own photography,” he said. After a busy photography career in the 1970s and 1980s, he decided to more or less fall out of public view for a time. ​“I’d occasionally drop a piece just to let people know I was still alive,” he said with a laugh. ​“I’ve only recently re-emerged on the gallery scene as a result of retirement.”

Wilton and Parker met 26 years ago when they were both part of an Erector Square show curated by Debbie Hesse. ​“Back then he was working with animal bones,” making pieces that evoked religious iconography and saints’ relics, Wilton said. ​“So that was my introduction to Bob and I was fascinated by his vision.” They became friends, and Wilton would ​“stop by and say hello” at Parker’s house, which is when he saw what Parker was making in the backyard. ​“As the collection in the yard grew and grew, I felt an obligation to document. That was the number one intention,” Wilton said.

But the project ended up being more than that, as Wilton saw that his photographs could move beyond simple documentation; he could put his own interpretation on what he saw in Parker’s work. ​“Bob Parker is the artist who creates the figures that I photograph, and I express my reaction, my encounter to his work,” Wilton said. In Parker’s work, Wilton saw ​“phantom, fleeting apparitions from the subconscious — nightmare kind of stuff. That creepiness is part of the human psyche, and one that doesn’t get paid attention.”

Photographing Parker’s work opened up a new direction for Wilton’s own artistic practice. Wilton has been a photographer for 50 years. ​“I began in pursuit of that West Coast vision that we see popularized by Ansel Adams,” he said. ​“Then I was drawn to the mysterious qualities of light.” Wilton’s previous work was often more colorful, and more fitting with conventional notions of beauty. ​“I have work that tries to capture the numinous, the spiritual, and the uplifting — the minor miracles that happen around us all the time…. But it’s all kind of a straight rendition of reality,” he said. ​“So I was kind of a purist. That is and will always be the primary focus of my interest in photography. I always follow the light. It doesn’t matter what it’s landing on.”

Encountering Parker’s sculptures, however, ​“began stirring in me new creative impulses that I’d never explored before,” Wilton said. ​“The creative opportunties that it afforded me were just thrilling — to throw away a lot of the self-imposed rules I’d been working under and try some far-out ways of putting the images together. There is this creative well that lives deep inside of us that I thought maybe was slipping away from me. This project was restorative. You don’t always know yourself as well as you think you do.”

Wilton began photographing Parker’s work three years ago. ​“I often did the actual photography at dusk, in the twilight of the day. They’re long exposures, mounted on a tripod.” Some of the images he made were more documentarian; he wanted to capture the way Parker was using color in his sculptures. Other images he converted to sepia. He had understood the sculptures as ​“visions emerging from the darkness” around them. He wanted to find ​“a creative technique that mirrored that feeling.” So ​“I start from darkness and build the image up into visibility.”

In three years of visits Wilton has noticed how the figures in Parker’s yard change. Sometimes Parker reconfigures them, or recombines parts of them. ​“Several figures that appear in this exhibit have changed into two, three, four other figures since I started,” Wilton said. Other times they’re just more weathered by the elements. ​“They’re obviously impacted by the environment, and I find decay fascinating — the textures, and the way light inhabits these figures and surfaces,” Wilton said.

Wilton worries a little that viewers will find Parker’s work, and his photographic commentary, a little too dark. ​“I was hoping to God that folks wouldn’t think, ​‘this guy is disturbed,’” Wilton said — especially as Parker seems to draw from a deep sense of humanity. Wilton once asked Parker about a specific piece, of a doll’s head with a hose entering its forehead. He discovered that Parker ​“has a deep and abiding concern for the culture’s impact on children, how it’s damaging them,” Wilton said. ​“The thing about the hose is society and culture force-feeding the brains of new humans. His commentary is out of concern for the human race.” If the tone of Parker’s work, and Wilton’s response, evokes horror, maybe that’s appropriate. ​“Some of what society and culture are doing to young humans is horrifying.”

All in all, ​“I saw this project as a nice fusion of two artists’ visions,” Wilton said — though he maintains that Parker’s work is the fuel. ​“Seeing the work come out as it did was a positive and rewarding experience…. I can’t speak to Bob’s purposes. I’m just amazed at what I saw. If I’m amazed maybe somebody else will be.”

“Parker/Wilton” finds an able pairing in the pieces in Brian Flinn’s ​“Circumnavigation.” Flinn himself sees some of the tonal similarities. ​“I think a lot of the sensibilities are the same at times. There’s a dark side that runs through my work as well,” he said. ​“It was a fortunate pairing for us.”

Flinn has been working with digital collage for about 20 years, but like Wilton, saw something of a new direction in the pieces in ​“Circumnavigation,” which he made in the past year and a half. ​“I don’t generally work with landscape imagery,” he said. In work exhibited at previous shows at Kehler Liddell Gallery, ​“I tended to focus on some sort of character — a person or object that was going to carry the significance of the piece.” The shift to working on landscapes ​“allowed me to expand out the narrative a bit.”

The pandemic also played a role. ​“I was doing a lot of walking — walks in the woods a lot,” Flinn said. He brought his camera with him, and used the images he captured as raw material to add to the collages. ​“I kind of used the camera like a bag to pick stuff up,” he said. ​“When I got back to the studio I had 150 photos to work from.”

The new photos created a different context for some of the many objects in his studio that are fodder for collage. Sources for images ​“can come from things I pick up and scan, things I find in boxes, old family photos,” Flinn said. ​“My studio is filled with a lot of crap, things I can’t throw out. In one of the pieces there’s a broken pine tree from a cuckoo clock that came from Germany.” Another image uses some photos Flinn found in the office of an abandoned camp in New Hampshire — of ​“a kid who was right eight years old, and there was this whole life there. It was almost like I’d walked into King Tut’s tomb.”

In creating the images, Flinn said, ​“the balancing idea is really important — as I’m working on them, I can feel a sense of absurdity. There’s a lot of play for me sometimes, even if it’s just playing with textures.” He continued to explain that ​“my work used to be much darker” before he added more whimsical elements. In the new pieces ​“there’s a hint of something ominous or not quite right that has just occurred, or is about to occur. But I think the play is just as important. It’s where I have a lot of fun… It’s a theater of the absurd in a way.”

Like Parker and Wilton, Flinn unsettles the viewer to try to shake them from complacency, to get them to really engage with the piece, and to get them to think. ​“To me at least it’s a good way to address things that are serious without getting too dang serious.” Also like Parker and Wilton, ​“a ton of experimentation” goes into creating the images. ​“They go through so many changes. I’m trying to find a relationship that I can work with both formally and conceptually. It’s kind of like building up this puzzle piece by piece, and changing out the pieces all the time.”

He knows a collage is done ​“when I can go through the piece and see the relationships,” when ​“I know what’s been happening in there, even if the things in there might not know.”

“How strange to have that sense when you’re finished — you just kind of know,” Flinn said. It’s that same sense of intuition that led Wilton on his own new path, even if, as Wilton said, you don’t always know yourself as well as you think you do.

“Circumnavigation” and ​“Parker/Wilton” run at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Nov. 28. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.