To have and have not (7066 A.D.)
Scott Redford reworks Modernism. As a regional artist isolated from that movement's historical centre, he employs an aesthetic vocabulary informed by a variety of sources, including Abstract Expressionism, Hard Edge Abstraction, Minimalism and Pop. Unlike that of many postmodern artists, his work does not use irony to debunk modernism's grand aims; detournement holds no attraction for him. Rather, his work involves a subtle, almost reverential, tactic of 'revisionism '. This revisionism might be characterized as the artist's teasing out a queer reading of modernism, and his invitation for us to do the same. Redford is cannily aware that it is our experience of meaning, as the relationship between an artist's identity and the work itself, that makes this revisionist tactic possible; it is Redford's identity as a gay man that permits us to read the work as queer.
The power of this revisionist logic becomes evident upon viewing the works in To Have and Have Not (7066 A.D.). The expressionistic Flags for Straight Boys is read as a critique of macho culture with its references to violence, flags and Fourex beer. We analyse the backwards text us 'inverting' straight culture and read Redford's use of over-pasting as a metaphor for revisionism itself. Lasercut slogans taken from popular surf clothing and rendered in swanky silver enamel, signpost the theme of gay beach culture in To You I Bestow (Partial Eclipse) and The World Only Spins Forward (7066 A.D.), while the abstract work Above the Elbow on the Guy's Arm at the Wickham (Third Version) is read, plausibly, in terms of a history of gay repression culminating in the disaster of AIDS. From the pastel colours of baby-blue and girly-pink used