installation view
“Draft Set” at Haw Contemporary features a dozen new paintings by James Woodfill. Featuring hard-edged geometric shapes and bright colors, the minimalist paintings are a departure for Woodfill, who is perhaps best known for his sculptures, installations and public art projects, but the works stay true to his iconic style, mixing high art and utilitarian hardware.
Woodfill has exhibited his work in Kansas City and across the nation since graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1980. Having taught at the Kansas City Art Institute for more than a decade, he recently received the honor of being appointed William T. Kemper Chair of the KCAI painting department.
The paintings in “Draft Set” are both simple and difficult to describe. They are square and flat, made with oil paint, brushes, rollers and tape. They tend to have only a few colors, and the images are mostly constructed with right angles. They could be compared to the markings you see on roadways, or symbols used on maps. A painting like “Proto-Type #3” features yellow and white lines on a black background, almost reminiscent of the yellow lines and black asphalt of a parking lot.
This ambiguity is intentional. According to Woodfill, whenever one of the paintings began to look like something, began to look like anything, he would change it and pull it back into something more nondescript. In true minimalist fashion, they are intentionally ‘paintings of nothing.’
It might seem odd to say that these paintings look like paintings, but if you have seen much of Woodfill’s work over the years, you’ll know that his sculptures and installations often blend seamlessly into the environment. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might mistake Woodfill’s art for unfinished walls, countertops, cabinets or scaffolding. Indeed, there is a good chance you’ve seen one of his public art works and mistaken it for a construction site. But the works of “Draft Set” eschew his usual color palette of whites, greys and beiges, and instead embrace bright primary colors, lime green, metallics and fluorescent paints.
While the works in “Draft Set” are paintings, they are still very much sculptural objects, especially the works “Signal Edit #2” and “Signal Edit #3.” These paintings do not hang on the wall, but instead are free standing, attached to large square frames and caster wheels. You can walk around them and see their back sides. They aren’t constructed like typical painting panels with angled miter joints but instead use simpler box joints and have visible bolts, washers and wingnuts. These details are an iconic Woodfill flourish: as much as the works embrace the purity of geometry and color, they also embrace a blue-collar vernacular of carpentry, the construction site and the hardware store. Woodfill doesn’t want to hide this hardware from you, the entire point of putting them on wheels is to get you walking around them and inspecting their construction.
This tension, between image and object, between art gallery and Home Depot, is perhaps the core feature of minimalism and Jim Woodfill’s art. Sixty years ago, the first minimalists created their painted and unpainted objects as a rebellion against the perceived purity of the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters of the post-war era. We are far from those days and their specific concerns, but in an odd way, their provocations seem plenty relevant in our increasingly digital world.
There is a saying online, often leveled as a dismissive insult, that one should “touch grass” — that is, one should get outside and make contact with the “real world.” Perhaps minimalism can serve a similar function today. Of course, they don’t really let you touch the artworks at Haw Contemporary. You’ll have to appreciate the tape lines, brush marks, wingnuts and caster wheels from a respectful distance.
“James Woodfill: Draft Set” continues at Haw Contemporary, 1600 Liberty St., through May 17. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday – Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. For more information, visit www.hawcontemporary.com or call 816.-842-5877.
