Radius Gallery shows visual art with narrative heft

The title, “True Places,” is taken from a section of “Moby Dick” describing the island that Queequeg, a crew member on the Pequod, hails from: “It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

Gallery co-owner Lisa Simon said the idea for the show began with the pairing of painters Kaetlyn Able of Bozeman and Jennifer Eli Indreland of Billings.

“There’s so much synergy between them,” she said. “They’re painting animals but they’re in another realm.”

She saw a common element of enchantment, perhaps allusions to storybooks, and from there, “the life of the mind,” the “place” in the title. To round out the show, they invited another painter, Jared Shear, to continue a series he’d begun based on Melville’s novel.

As a complement, they’re showing pieces by Jared Swenson, a ceramic artist from Minnesota. His work includes references to different historical periods, with imagery of fish and dinosaurs, that conjures a sense of place and culture through functional vessels.

“True Places” is on view at Radius Gallery through Aug. 24.

In Able’s work, moose, deer and other animals are rendered in tiny white lines on patterned black backgrounds. Their antlers are crowned with bouquets of brightly colored flowers, and an occasional smaller creature. She’s rendered them in a detailed naturalism, but the combination of elements is dreamlike, giving them a feeling of magic realism.

The black and white imagery of the animals isn’t painted — she “scratches” each little hair into a layer of black ink on a clay panel with a tattoo needle. She finds hyper-realism as a style addictive, albeit time consuming. Since she’s etching into the surface, she said she feels like a paleontologist, carving away before the big reveal.

“Suddenly the animal will seem to emerge from this darkness,” she said.

Each animal is pictured in front of a black, wallpaper-like pattern, almost like it wandered into a Victorian parlor, a recurring motif in her work.

“It’s become this reference to this almost imaginary space that links all of the animals,” she said.

The idea of a menagerie stored in an unusual space dates back to her time in Boston. A Bozeman resident now, she grew up out East, studied at Wellesley College and then the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She used to sneak into Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology to work from the specimens. Some were quite old, and showing it. In that setting, it felt like “the illusion is broken, which is really interesting to me.”

While she spent quite some time on portraits of people, the animals became more prominent after moving to Montana.

“Encounters that I’ve had feel so interesting and meaningful that I can’t really help but incorporate the animals,” she said.

They also seem to connect more with viewers, too, who may wonder at the confluence of black and white creatures and the full-color flora. The combination “makes you ask more questions about the relationships between the different elements, and that’s what I want to draw your attention to,” she said.

Jennifer Eli Indreland’s art includes wildlife but her style won’t fit within any notions of Western painting. She alludes to Old World art, with flattened perspective and figures arranged like Russian icons, and hints of surrealism. Think of a black fawn with wings, a circle of wolves in dresses, holding hands. Her frames are often ornate, with filigree that reinforce that feeling that they’re quite old.

As a whole, she’d like to “push the surrealism that already exists in the natural world.”

The combination of subject matter and cosmopolitan visual flair reflects her biography. She lives in Billings, her family’s from the Red Lodge area, and she spent four years in England during high school.

“That definitely affected my aesthetic for the rest of my life,” she said.

She was exposed to medieval art, tapestries and patterning there; and honed her technique at the Rhode Island School of Design.

After moving back to Montana a decade ago and hitting trails, she began incorporating the local wildlife into her paintings.

Her “Winged Fawn” is informed by myths, but it’s not based on a particular one. This creature (all black) is calmly bedded down in a forest floor that resembles an underwater scene, with mushrooms and brush that glows like coral.

She’s also inspired by contemporary writing, like the author Angela Carter (“The Company of Wolves.”) In one piece, five wolves in dresses hold hands around a fire in the dead of winter, white snow all around them. It’s not an ominous scene, either, though whatever’s happening is left to the viewer.

“In my mind, they’re out there performing their own rituals,” she said.

In another series, the wolves pose for portraits in elaborate clothing with ornate patterns, to resemble Russian icons. The animals, really, are stand-ins for human figures.

“We can project anything we want onto an animal,” she said.

Jared Shear lives in Thompson Falls, where he grew up. He left to study at the Art Institute of Seattle and worked there in various art fields: graphic design, in production for animated TV shows and commercials and graphics for MSNBC.com. He has a website with two unexpected styles that you don’t expect to overlap in one person: Imaginative computer-based work that often re-creates scenes from science fiction and fantasy films and movies; and, on the other hand, plein air landscape painting. While seemingly unrelated, he says the techniques and practice of traditional painting play into the pieces about speculative places, far, far away. In 2007, he undertook a project to paint Cougar Peak, a 6,600-foot mountain north of town, every day for a year, in a variety of media. The works were exhibited at the Missoula Art Museum in 2013 in a show titled, “Cougar Peak-A-Boo.”

For his latest series, Simon invited Shear to merge these two sides of his work after she saw some “Moby Dick”-related artworks on his website.

Since the book has been illustrated by many artists over the years, he decided to focus on the people, such as Ahab, and the fellow members of his crew. The images were built on a bedrock of research, real-life models, software he used to create 3D models of sea battle scenes, his love of comic books and the drama of cinematography. In one painting, the sperm whale rises out of the water, dwarfing rowboats with whalers navigating choppy waters.

In another piece that looks like it could be part of a film still, Ahab looks directly at the viewer, his left milky white eye crossed by a scar. A half circle of spear points are aimed at his jaw line, from whalers “pledging allegiance to him.”

In other paintings, he illustrates the captain’s turmoil metaphorically, “whether it’s showing his heart with barnacles attached, [or] in one painting, opening his chest, with worms and spiders coming out. That he was sort of dead inside … he had all this rottenness that had putrefied over time,” he said.

Shear has read Herman Melville’s classic novel of whaling and obsession and revisited individual sections of the epic-length book. Along with the great prose, he finds lasting lessons in Ahab’s “unforgiveness” and his “inner turmoil and his sort of rage he has for the whale, that still speaks to anyone, because we all deal with that at some point in life,” he said.