Ball the Wall

About

The ordinary changes fast. Hunkered between Utopia and Nostalgia, the commonplace is both imperative and model for Stephen Dean, James Hyde and Richard Woods. In this show Woods presents images of wallpaper and wood grain bigged up, both in size and in visceralness. Woods renders his patterns in viscous gloss paint. Hyde works the material means of the ordinary, presenting boxes of plate glass, the basic construction unit of the modernist curtain wall, containing oil paint-- that most ordinary of art materials. Dean has used familiar objects (stacked paperback books and modified ladders) in the past to make his painterly objects. In this show it's barroom dart boards, scrambled to make vertiginous dials.