james dodd, peter harding, yoko kojio, tim sterling, kate stryker
In '80s skateboarder-speak, 'gleaming the cube' translates roughly to 'reaching the ultimate', implying a youthful recklessness in search of an absolute, incomparable experience. The work in Gleam, a show of new artists at the Experimental Art Foundation, sometimes hints at that sort of experience, but one gets the feeling it is more tongue in cheek than in earnest. The focus here, generally speaking, is unashamedly on surface effect-but there is a suggestion too that this work is not quite giving itself away.
Peter Harding's compelling abstract paintings fill the first half of the gallery. There are over thirty in all, arranged in a number of grid formations. Each features a series of concentric circles, recalling the academic abstraction of Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns. Harding, however, draws these elegant works beyond formalism, pairing them with acerbic titles like Tales from between my legs, The taming of a bi-polar bear and My unconventional constitution (all from The Mind is a Magician series) and taking them into the realm of the personal. The laborious and seemingly obsessive nature of their production suggests some kind of catharsis-the red and black paintings from the series Which of These Best Describes Your Pain?, at once sinister and vulnerable, adding weight to this interpretation. But on another level, their roughly LP size, and their playful fashion-conscious colour sense lends them a retro coolness and appeal that is purely decorative with another nod to pop.
James Dodd's billboard scaled Untitled wall painting is a red silhouette of a sneaker, painted, as its title suggests, directly on the wall of the gallery. The work deals with all the old issues of painting scale, colour, dynamism-but in a hip