Three Artists Reconnect At Kehler Liddell

One figure reclines on the ground, head thrown back. The other hovers, impossibly, in the air above the first. Their only points of contact are the delicate hands of the one doing the hovering, and their lips, making contact. Julie Fraenkel’s The Visit is playful and poignant, and one of many highlights of ​“Re: Connecting,” a show at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville that finds, as the title suggests, works by three artists — Fraenkel, Liz Antle‑O’Donnell, and Matthew Garrett — connecting with one another in formal, thematic, and emotional ways.

The show runs through April 21.

Walking into the gallery on Whalley Avenue, it’s easy to appreciate that the three artists share certain affinities — for black and white and shades of pale color, particularly green, that suggest at once something light and airy and something a little otherworldly. Antle‑O’Donnell gets her effects through repetition of forms that makes the familiar disorienting. On one level, the shapes in one of her Portals series are images of the blandest suburbia — row houses with manicured green lawns. But Antle‑O’Donnell spins these shapes into a circle that blurs what they are. You see the overall structure before you see what makes it up. That lets you see the humor in Antle‑O’Donnell’s work, and also the way she’s here to, pretty literally, stir things up.

After all, the word ​“portal” is often full of portent, signifying the doorway to another dimension. But it’s also just a name for a circular window, whether in a ship (a porthole) or house, and Antle‑O’Donnell leans into that for other pieces in the Portals series.

O’Donnell’s tilt toward realism in some of her pieces connect nicely with Garrett’s photography. His images of nature are in some ways straightforward, of waterfalls and the patterns of foliage. But he gives his subjects a particularly luminous treatment. The colors are just a little more vivid, a little more saturated, so you feel the images as much as see them.

Garrett has also included a series of tiny photographs printed on the sides of wooden boxes just a couple inches across, and arranged in a seemingly scattershot way across a section of the gallery wall. These find Garrett ranging into a kind of documentary photography with a eye toward the slightly surreal. In one, a boy dances on a tabletop in a way that seems improbable — why isn’t the table flipping? — while in another, multiple butterflies land on a human hand. Under what circumstances did this happen?

But the sense of wonder might be most acute in Garrett’s more realistic images. There are touches of fun, like the fact that one of the people in the picture is standing on a toilet seat. But there’s an element of mystery, too. What is making adult and child stare out the bathroom window like that? What are they watching? And the body language tells you everything you need to know about the connection between the two people, even if you don’t know who they are.

The body language in Garrett’s photo even finds its parallel in another of Fraenkel’s pieces, The Promise, a moving piece about carrying weight and helping others. Fraenkel’s images and sculptures cut to the bone in their textured simplicity. Together, all three artists help one another to bring out the humor and humanity in the work they do.