Meet The Proboscoid From The Planet Rhinoplast

Gar Waterman may have called the piece Proboscoid from the Planet Rhinoplast, in honor of a certain nasal prominence that emerges from the work. But the piece is far from extraterrestrial. Waterman sourced it from Fair Haven, and from New Haven’s own long industrial history.

On Sunday Waterman and artist Tom Edwards were on hand at Kehler Liddell Gallery to open their current shows — Edwards’s ​“Dreams and Shadows” and Waterman’s ​“Pattern Language” — which run at the Westville gallery through March 15. To a packed house, the two artists explained that the process behind the pieces were sometimes an adventure in themselves.

Edwards first drew the audience’s attention to a colorful triptych that dominated the wall it hung on. ​“This work started with my association with Siena,” Edwards said, about making a trip there. ​“I was going to do a standard landscape,” but he ended up ​“doing something a little different.”

The Italian city is divided into 17 districts known as contrade. ​“Each one has an associated symbol,” Edwards said — animals, trees, towers. Of the menagerie of creatures and objects in the triptych, ​“the only one that doesn’t belong” among the contrade symbols ​“is the dog.” The dog happens to be Edwards’s own, and was ​“the reason I was late today,” the artist said, ​“because she ran off.” This drew laughter from the gathered crowd.

Later in the talk, Edwards drew attention to the prints on plaster that he had made for the show. He has been making prints since 1978 and has taken to experimenting with both the copper plate on which he does his etching and the material he prints on.

“I had seen a print at Yale 40 years ago on a piece of plaster,” he said. He decided to try it out. For this exhibit, ​“the theme was a wall,” a ​“response to the border wall that’s been proposed.” With this particular printmaking process, he said, ​“I wanted to create not just a pictorial image, but an actual wall itself.”

Edwards studied images of the Berlin Wall and was inspired by the way time and vandalism had given its surface a colorful, varied texture. Holding up the copper plate that held the engraving, he said, ​“I laid this in the driveway and drove over it with my car.” The copper plate was in a sense impervious to harm. ​“If you damage the plate, I can just print it and make it part of the image,” he said. (“That makes me want to tap dance on it,” said an audience member.)

Edwards’s handling of the plate helped create the undulating surface in the plaster, which Edwards felt was a personal innovation, and something he hadn’t seen elsewhere.

“This was me swimming in the ocean on my own,” he said.

The story behind Gar Waterman’s pieces, meanwhile, brought the audience right back to New Haven. Waterman made the pieces in the exhibit from forms he had salvaged from the National Pipe Bending Company building on River Street in Fair Haven. The building had begun its life as the Bigelow Boiler Company in 1873 and became National Pipe Bending a few years later. True to its name, the company produced cast iron parts for boilers.

“The backbone of the Industrial Revolution was cast iron,” Waterman said. And ​“like Winchester,” National Pipe Bending ​“was one of the greats here.”

The company saw its heyday during World War II, then declined and finally shuttered in the 1980s. When Waterman visited the building a few years ago, he found that all the metal machinery had already been removed. The third roof, however, ​“was full of amazing things,” he said. He found the wooden forms that the factory had used as the basis for its resin molds, which were in turn used to cast the iron.

“I liberated a bunch of them. The building was going to be demolished, and these guys were going to go with them.”

The craftsmen who made those forms, Waterman said, ​“were some of the best woodworkers of their day.” Not only did they make the pine forms to exacting specifications, but they used a cross-grain structure in building them so they would be resistant to changing their shape with weather and other changes in temperature.

“There’s this theme of my work — my wife would call me cheap — of ​‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’”

The form were ​“wonderful shapes,” Waterman said, but he was unsure at first what to do with them, and they sat in his studio for a few years. Then, in getting ready for the exhibit, he found it was time. He began to organize and arrange the forms, fastening them together with screws. The patina of the wood was as he had found it. His only alteration to the pieces was to paint the patches of yellow on the pieces red. ​“I wanted to minimize the sense of my tinkering with them,” he said.

Some pieces became faces and human forms. Others stayed more abstract ​“because of the way the shapes work,” Waterman said. ​“They went together organically — the trick was figuring out when to stop.”

The pieces are ​“as much about the forms I found as what I’ve done with them,” Waterman said. ​“They come from a history of a dirty, dangerous, unhealthy industry.” Reusing them, he continued, ​“gives them another life. These really are a piece of New Haven’s industrial past.”

“Dreams and Shadows” and ​“Pattern Language” run at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through March 15. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.