Artists Come Out To Play

Riotously elaborated watercolor sets. Animated creatures bursting from their frames. Cars balanced on their heads.

In their first show at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville, the gallery’s new members each display, in their own way, a taste for the playful.

The new members’ show runs through Feb. 9.

The playfulness starts with Lisa Toto’s work — and particularly the watercolor sets that she has turned into mixed-media pieces that live somewhere between sculpture and collage. The individual pieces’ topics are serious. Student Movement addresses the general movement among high-school students in the United States against gun violence thanks to the organizing that happened after the Parkland shooting. Another is what appears to be a touching tribute to the artist’s dog. The Evolution of Wonder Woman gives the viewer a quick snapshot of the ways in which that iconic character has changed — and not changed — in response to changes in greater society. But Toto’s execution is always done with frenzy and a sense of fun. Taken together, the watercolor sets turned sculptures convey the ability of art to address serious issues with energy and enthusiasm.

Chris Ferguson’s approach to representational painting, by contrast, is relatively straightforward. It’s what he chooses to paint that gives his canvases their sense of leisure. In one is a Mexican food truck that certainly looks like it could be taken straight from a scene at Long Wharf, which has long held sway as an epicenter for Mexican street food in New Haven. In another painting, a mother and child enjoy some time at the beach. Even a picture of Savin Rock during a storm that has whipped the water of New Haven’s harbor into frothy waves feels more exciting than dangerous.

Amanda Duchen is a serious potter and has the ceramic pieces on display to prove it; they are shaped exquisitely, the grazes finely textured. But it’s her menagerie creatures that might first catch the eye. Comical in the best sense, her animal sculptures have so much personality that the frames Duchen has placed them in can’t entirely contain them. Placed next to each other, they take on an almost Statler and Waldorf air. Look more closely, though, and it’s clear that Duchen makes them with the same care and attention to detail that she gives to her fine pottery.

Photographer R.F. Wilton, meanwhile, takes us on a tour of Wild Bill’s Nostalgia Center, a place in Middletown colorful enough to be considered a roadside attraction. The heightened colors in Wilton’s get at not only the flashy surface details of the place, but the animating spirit behind it all. They’re the kind of photographs that first make you want to get to Middletown as soon as possible to see the place for yourself; then, when you learn that the place closed (in 2017), you regret not having gone years ago.

In an accompanying artist’s statement, Ana Henriques writes that her paper tapestries are ​“meditations on the spaces women fill and create for themselves … that bring to mind all the handmade work created by my ancestors.” That’s palpable in the holes Henriques creates in her work, and the strong colors that dash around them. She shows us the wear and tear that come from centuries of labor, but also the exuberance with which she honors it.

Kehler Liddell Gallery’s new members’ show runs at the gallery space at 873 Whalley Ave. through Feb. 9. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.