Volume
III
Issue 17
Summer 2001
Switching Channels
by Gerry O
Switching Channels
Bill White / David Hatchett
Exhibition at Sideshow Gallery, 17 March - 23 April 2001
319 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Installation view (left to right): Bill White: Man In Panda Suit, 2001, 72 x 64 1/2 inches;
David Hatchett: Squeeze on this (Snake), 2001, 20 x 15 inches;
Hatchett: Busted, 2001, 97 x 23 x 23 inches;
Hatchett: Street Shopper Chopper, 2001, 36 x 54 x 20 inches;
White: Big Puppet, 2000, 72 x 64 1/2 inches. All photos courtesy the artists.
The correspondence between the work and person of artists David Hatchett and Bill White reads like an experience of switching channels, wherein a painter and a sculptor have cradled their art evolved from childhood imprints - one made while playing with toys and tools, the other while watching TV shows.
For Hatchett, the fascination of tearing apart and reconfiguring toys, along with the magic of tools in the hands of an open mind, have evolved into a dynamic strategy for making sculpture. Cobbled from post-industrial discarded construction materials, the hoses, metal tubes, cables, studs and other buy-products are rough-handed into recombined objects clad under a patchwork of brushed metal, thinly layered under a swarm of rivet heads, alternately exposing and encasing the cast-off junk of a worksite.
Hatchett: Suck on this (Snake), 2001, 20 x 41 inches.
These small wall friezes and freestanding floor pieces are loose and wooly amalgams of mechanical fantasy that have a disarming but delicate beauty, for all their hand-wrought physicality. While Hatchett borrows from the construction worker's vocabulary, he neither strictly samples nor comes anywhere close to a result born of proper technique. He cuts across these techniques and materials, disengaged from their original intent. Unfinished edges and diverse materials combine like vital organs torn from the gutbucket of a renegade robot and are then mounted on the wall like a trophy. Remembrance of Things Future.
White: Movement and Puppets, 2001, 32 x 39 3/8 inches.
White mines a different claim. In his paintings, the menace behind children's TV shows and television newscasts is presented as a thin veil cloaking the lost innocence of the "adult" world in the guise of harmless entertainment. Man in Panda Suit, in two versions, one almost six by six feet, the other a TV-size canvas, animate a frame of blurry television programming dredged from the slippery tide of imagery that washes over us. By choosing this moment of uncertain context, White focuses on the unarticulated threats carried by this costumed figure.
Installation view (left to right): White: Man in Panda Suit, 2001, 72 x 64 1/2 inches;
Hatchett: Squeeze on This (Snake), 2001, 20 x 15 inches;
Hatchett: Busted, 2001, 97 x 23 x 23 inches.
Coupled with the push-pull scale changes, these two works both enhance and subvert our reception of repeated subject matter. Our conscious viewing is channeled into a background mode - removed from our self control yet fully participating in the scary thoughts of what might lie behind the bland animal stare. The synthetic strident hues of television lighting are captured in these paintings with a technique that emphasizes the lack of clear edges - feeling caught in the middle. These fuzzy characters become fixed, generic and without humanity. White takes a sideways look at the chill emptiness behind the gaze. These paintings are strongest when taken at their lightest - Touch and Go is all you need to know.
About the Author:
Gerry O is the pseudonym of a New York-based art writer. He can be contacted in care of the editor at editor@arts4all.com
Resources:
The exhibition, Switching Channels, continues at the Sideshow Gallery through Monday 23 April 2001. Gallery hours are Friday - Monday, 12 - 6 pm. In Williamsburg at 319 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211. For more information contact Richard Timperio at 718 / 486 8180 or email sideshowgallery@aol.com.