Photographers Capture People Out Of Place

At first glance the cityscape looks deserted. It could be a ruin of an old city, or one abandoned due to conflict.

But look closer — much closer — and you can see that there are indeed people there. Someone putting out laundry on one of those miniscule rooftops. Someone else on one of the walkways meandering between the buildings.

Marjorie Wolfe’s Matera, situated in the center of the Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville, is representative of the works in her exhibit, ​“Far and Wide,” and the paired exhibit ​“Extended Visions,” featuring work by fellow artist Tom Edwards, on view now until April 22. In both exhibits, the artists explore landscapes and objects that are nearly if not completely devoid of people, but in which the presence of humans is still deeply felt.

In Edwards’s pieces there are no people in sight at all; ​“Extended Visions” is essentially a collection of still lifes and depictions of small, uninhabited rooms. But in many cases, Edwards has decided to frame his pieces as triptychs, or using canvases shaped like architectural forms, explicitly human constructions. The framing enriches the subject when you consider what more traditional art has employed the triptych for. Many triptychs were made to be altarpieces in churches, and so often depicted biblical scenes. Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch famously turned the religious triptych on its ear to depict more carnal, chaotic, and sometimes even hellish themes — often laced with a real sense of humor.

So Edwards’s use of the triptych and other architectural forms invites some interpretation, given that the subject is nature itself. A first thought is that the art is making a point about the sacredness of nature, something that naturalists can get behind easily. But it’s a little more complicated than that, too. Beach in the Moonlight, despite the serenity of the title, has a writhing energy to it. So do the other triptychs; the cacophony of details in the pebbles, roots and textures of bark are more Boschian than devotional. So Edwards’s pieces get at our fraught relationship to the natural world. There are those who find communing with it to be a deeply spiritual experience. And while there’s a lot of validity to that idea, nature also has a way of being gnarlier than that sometimes. It’s not all golden light and Hudson River School pastoral visions. For all the times that experiencing nature can be rapturous, there are also times when it can feel implacable, unreasoning, even menacing. The natural world without us eludes our ability to capture it in a frame entirely.

Marjorie Wolfe likewise dives into the idea that natural landscapes — and, really, even manmade landscapes — are so much bigger than us. Her own framing of her subjects makes that quite literal, often with slyly humorous results.

Wind Sock at first appears to be an abstract study in grayness. Further examination reveals that this is a photograph of a runway at a small airport, the plane and the runway’s wind sock enveloped in layers of fog. From one angle it’s a forlorn image. But the title suggests that isn’t all Wolfe has in mind. There’s something of a comedy of errors going on as well — especially if you imagine that maybe there’s someone in that plane, hoping to take off soon. We may bring the plane out, looking for a chance to fly. But sometimes the weather has other plans.

And the title of Adriatic Campers is initially the only indication that there’s anyone in this image of a sun-drenched coastline. It takes a moment to see the vehicle in the center of the image. And you have to take several steps closer to see the people who have driven the vehicle out to this distant point. The people are annihilated by the scale of the image around them. There’s even something a little illicit about the image, in that the couple has almost certainly driven out to the shore in the hopes of having some privacy. We’re the intruder. We’re spying. Yet there’s also something playfully casual about it. These people are very much in their element, as at home on this rugged coast as sunbathers on a crowded Miami beach. The moment captures people at their idiosyncratic best, both at the center of the image and out of place within it.

“Far and Wide” and ​“Extended Visions” run at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through April 22. Click here for more information.