Artists Look At Beginning Again

Hank Paper may have given his photograph the perfect title. Another Brand New Day is on one level just a normal street scene in Italy, but its vivid colors and warm light are almost supernaturally delicious. Paper finds the ecstasy in the everyday, and with it, a palpable sense of hope.

Paper’s photograph is part of ​“Renewal,” the show running now through Feb. 4 at Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville. The juried show asked artists to consider the following statement: ​“Renewal is a driving force of life. It is: spring growth. a new moon. the act of beginning again. replacing something that is worn out, run-down or broken. the process of reinvention. finding hope. how have you observed and experienced renewal?”

From that prompt, the gallery’s member jury received several hundred submissions, which they narrowed down to 52 artists working in painting, photography, and sculpture. The lively and varied results make for an uplifting show with a wild range of stylistic diversity.

It begins with Tom Edwards’s 2x2 Towers. Made from scrap wood — the theme is literally built into the piece — the sculpture seems to grow from the floor and pleasantly evokes human-made structures like skyscrapes, other animal-made structures like various insect nests, and plantlife. Whatever way your brain initially goes, the piece is there to help you find the energy in all its facets, and to explore the connections among all of them, and the ways in which they’re all perhaps part of the same larger thing.

For many, the idea of renewal is about finding peace, and many pieces in the show partake of that feeling, without being cloying about it. One such piece is Jill Butcher’s Friends; in its subject matter and its execution, it exudes a sense of comfort and familiarity that invites everyone in. And who wouldn’t want to be a part of it?

The show also gets points for not being overtly (and relentlessly) sunny and hopeful. Marcella Kurowski-Cavaliereit’s piece is both funny and unsettling, and more the first than the second. The figure about to have its foot munched doesn’t seem unhappy about it, and the muncher’s glee is palpable. And who’s to say that whatever’s about to happen won’t be maybe a little erotic for both of them? The fun compounds in naming the piece after the legendary Shaggs song, a delirious piece of musical mayhem. Renewal isn’t always just about warm sunlight and chirping birds. It can also be about something wilder.

A case in point is Karen Vradenburg’s wax encaustic piece, which astonishingly works as both an abstract piece and, viewed just right, as a near-photographic depiction of a churning sea below a cloudy sky. But the piece isn’t stormy. It’s about power, energy, creation — the exhilaration of changing forms.

Then there are pieces that lean toward a quieter, more matter-of-fact sense of rebirth. Amy Elise Brownstein’s piece — like David Ottenstein’s photo nearby of people working a farm — has an earned hope in it that comes from its observation of detail. Perhaps most poignant in Brownstein’s piece is that the bird that hatched, and the bird that hatched it, are already gone. We’re left with an empty nest. There’s a hard-edged question in this take on renewal: Do we stay in the nest, a place that mother and child have already decided has outlasted its purpose? Or do we follow the birds wherever they may go, into the wider world?

“Renewal” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Feb. 4. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.