Welcome to Westville

Kehler Liddell Gallery is pleased to present Expansion, featuring gallery artists Matthew Garrett’s new works in photography and Amanda Walker’s raw canvas paintings. 

For Matthew Garrett, expansion came by seeing the world through a new lens. "I rarely picked up a "real" camera during COVID, but I never put down my phone," states Matthew. "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. 

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." 

Amanda Walker's relationship to expansion marks the intersection between intuition and mythology. "Expansion, she states, 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." 

Walker reflects that "Although there are many similarities across cultures, there are also differences that reflect different environments and customs. The myths are often massive and operatic in their scope and creatively inspiring. 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?" This body of works stems from that question. 

These paintings also mark a transition in medium from her previous way of working, which was drawing with watercolor 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. 

Biographies:

Matthew Garrett studied photography at Louisiana State University before completing his BFA at Mount Allison University in Canada. He then continued his education by working with Sean Kernan through most of the 1990's. Garrett is a founding member of Kehler Liddell Gallery and was one of the leaders of New Haven's Photo Arts Collective for its entire 20+ year lifespan. https://www.instagram.com/imagerealm/ 

Amanda Walker was born in San Antonio and raised in Dallas, TX. A costume designer by training, the pandemic has meant more time to work on visual art, her first love. Influenced by history and myth as well as over 25 years designing costumes for theater, Amanda's work centers on narrative and the exploration of artifice. Amanda is a graduate of the Yale School Of Drama class of 2004 and has taught costume design at Mt. Holyoke College. She has been a member of Kehler Liddell Gallery since 2017. Currently, she lives in Bethany, CT, with her husband. 

http://amandakatewalker.com