Bill White and David Hatchett: Switching Channels

The correspondence between the work and person of artists David Hatchett and Bill White reads like an experience of switching channels: two individuals, painter and sculptor, working different sides of the fence. Both deal with early childhood imprints, one made while playing with toys and tools, the other watching TV shows.

For Hatchett, the fascination of tearing apart and reconfiguring toys, and the magic of tools in the hands of an open mind, have evolved into a dynamic strategy in making sculpture. Hatchett makes sculpture cobbled together from post-industrial discarded construction materials - hoses, metal tubes, cables, studs and other bi-products with the rough-handed practices of a builder into re-combined objects clad in a patchwork of brushed metal held together under a swarm of rivet heads, alternately exposing and encasing the cast off junk of a work site.

These small wall friezes and free-standing floor pieces (some cut in two) are loose and wooly amalgams of mechanical fantasy that have a disarming but delicate beauty for all their evidence of hand wrought physicality. While Hatchett borrows from the construction worker's vocabulary, he neither strictly samples nor comes anywhere close to a faithful rehash. He cuts across techniques and materials -literally and figuratively- that separated from original purposes, are reconstructed in a fresh and playful manner. In some of the work, funky unfinished edges and various materials combine like vital organs from the gutbucket of a renegade robot, then mounted on the wall like a trophy. Remembrance Of Things Future.

White mines a different claim. He coolly projects in his paintings the menace behind children's TV shows and television newscasts, that veil that thinly cloaks the lost innocence of the 'adult' world in the guise of harmless entertainment. "Man In A Panda Suit" in two versions, one almost five by five feet, the other a TV-sized canvas, animate a frame of blurry television programming dredged from the slippery tide of imagery that daily washes over us. By choosing this moment of uncertain context, White focuses on the unarticulated threats carried by this figure, carried along in the background of our conscious viewing now separated from original intent. Coupled with the push-pull scale changes with the repeated subject matter, these two works both enlarge and, in comparison, diminish the works faceless, intimidating power to feed the scary thoughts of what might loom behind the bland stare.

White captures the synthetic strident hues of television lighting in his paintings with a technique that emphasizes the lack of clear edges, a feeling of caught in the middle. The faces of these characters become somehow, fixed, generic, and without humanity. White takes a sideways look at the emptiness behind the surface. The paintings are strongest when taken at their lightest - Touch And Go Is All You Need To Know. Chill.

Gordon Douglas