Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: A dispatch from a journalist arrested during the RNC protests
Next story: News of the Weird

Kevin Kegler turn his West Side garden into a gallery

The Art of The Exterior

Last Saturday evening, artist Kevin Kegler invited the city into his backyard on 10th Street for an art show. No gallery, no walls, just artwork and garden.

I was immediately struck by what Kegler was doing in his art; wood planks, rooted with pine board, gave the appearance of a shrine-like structure under the eaves of which were placed small figurative and still-life compositions in oil paints accented with gold leaf. Framed and finished wood with pinstriped detail, these pieces came across as both secular and spiritual, as touchstones of lost moments of joy and sorrow painstakingly discovered, treasured talismans of life’s momentus minutia. Enshrined as they are, these little memory stations represent for Kegler a newly delicate assessment of feelings recently unburdened and painted into place, held fast as if under aspic.

These pieces were stuck like stakes at intervals in a vegetable garden. Standing upright in a pattern surrounding the circular garden, they formed a tribal unit to complete a whole in a series of integral relationships isolated, but in vital proximity.

Along with the planked roof painting shelters are monoprints of natural flora and fauna, bees and flowers displayed in plastic sleeves and hung on lines with clothespins, giving free access to the viewers walking though Kegler’s garden Saturday evening. Music, food, and poetry completed the community event.

While on sabbatical from his teaching position at Daemen College, Kegler traveled to Italy and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, pre-Renaissance miniatures and especially the triptychs caught his imagination; the scale, the precise delicacy, and the opulent gold leaf treatment gave him a way to think about episodes of his life recollected in middle age.

At 50, Kegler is moving toward an artistic plateau where he concentrates on the elegy, the requiem. Traditionally painting is for interior embellishment; for outside there are carvings in stone and marble (and, since the October storm, wood). Kegler sets his interior pieces in a garden, the focal point of a treasured community resource.

j. tim raymond

blog comments powered by Disqus