Gar Waterman

Pest Control

William Kent: Prints       Gar Waterman: Sculpture

KLG Gallery, February 10 – March 13      2022

William Kent was a Connecticut artist I got to know several years before he died in 2012 - quite an irascible character, very political work, remarkable sculptor and printmaker with a style that was anything but subtle - heavy irony delivered with stark humor, societal idiocies reduced with relish to graphic conundrums.  Nabakov believed Kafka’s Metamorphosis to be about the artist's struggle for existence in a society full of philistines intent on destroying him step by step, a point of view that echoed Bill Kent’s own relationship with the art world and may have had something to do with the frequent appearance of insects in his work. Pest Control features a selection of Bill’s insect inspired carved slate prints along with my sculpture, including the new Coleottolo series featuring beetles on flame cut steel plate drops in a juxtaposition of organic and architectural that reflects my belief that nature will endure past our own brief tenure here on Earth.

There are a number of species of wood boring beetles killing millions of trees in several regions of the country right now. Here in the East, we have Emerald ash boring beetles – out west you will find, among others, the Western pine beetle and the Deathwatch beetle, all leaving massive swathes of dead timber in their wake. Milder winters limit insect populations less effectively, so the infestations are getting worse. We regard these creatures as pests when their numbers and dietary habits don’t coincide with our own interests, but there is a clear environmental irony present here: the beetles wreaking havoc on our forests are simply doing what they do – like us, they are opportunists. However, the human race is the unequivocal master of destruction on this planet, with a 7 billion plus population devouring finite resources in a fossil fueled rush towards a catastrophically warmed world. We have only to look in the mirror to glimpse Gregor Samsa and identify the real pest on the planet.

Max Coleman's fabulous 15'x 26' slug mural, now featured on the loading door of the aquarium in conjunction with the nudibranch exhibit inside.

This is the prototype of my nudibranch inspired art/science exhibit, on display here in Connecticut at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, which remains open during these difficult times. If you're looking for a little relief from Covid sequestration, put on your M-95, get on I-95, and come slug it out.  The aquarium has lots of great marine creatures to look at, but you will not see many actual live sea slugs. An important takeaway from this exhibit is the fact that the vast majority of nudibranchs cannot be removed from their natural habitats without killing them, so the handful of live slugs that are on display represent some of the very few species that can be successfully kept in an aquarium environment.

It's a great show, there are some fabulous photographs by an international crew of slug shooters and, of course, there is sculpture from the world's greatest (and only, as far as I know) stone sea slug sculptor. No easy feat to make a claim like that on a planet of 7 billion plus people, but I'll bet my rhinophores on it.

My show at KLG Gallery in February of 2020 will feature sculpture assembled from foundry patterns. The Bigelow Boiler Company was a major New Haven industry for over a century, and many of these beautifully made wood patterns for casting in iron came from the National Pipe Bending Co., a Bigelow subsidiary. I rescued these from an attic of the old factory building over in Fair Haven not long before it was finally torn down, and I am very pleased to be able to give them another life.

At 43" long, this is the largest beetle sculpture I have created to date. Like the Japanese I am somewhat obsessed with stag beetles - maybe something about the extraordinary configurations of their outsized mandibles. Assemble from myriad pieces of scrap steel, this sculpture required hundreds of hours of welding and grinding - a dirty job, but someone has to do it.