330 40th Street
Oakland, CA  94609
 

Dorothy Goode:
"They're My Friends...  I Made Them."

Opens December 4, 2015, 6-9pm
Closes January 30, 2016

Three30Forty is proud to present “They’re My Friends, I Made Them,” a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Dorothy Goode.

Goode is known primarily for her paintings and this exhibition marks her first major foray into sculpture, all borne of an appreciation of a friend’s craftsmanship. The skeletal system of these sculptures is taken from wood supports used to keep roughly 100 paintings in formation during her 2014 exhibition at Toomey Tourell Fine Art in San Francisco. These cleats were designed and made by Goode’s friend Jon Erikson, and after the show was dismantled they were returned to Goode carefully wrapped by the gallery, with each board labeled and numbered. She had no more need of these cleats, but the care that was taken with both their manufacture and their transport resulted in Goode being strangely unable to discard them, and so they sat in the corner of her studio.

Eventually, the sight of those boards bundled in plastic, full of screw holes, with her name printed carefully on each drove her to reach for saws and clamps. As a painter, Goode had not been accustomed to working in three dimensions: “It became quickly clear to me that decisions made in the round are qualitatively different than those with only a flat surface to contend with… I kept my methods simple. And I would continue to build upon an object until it took on a recognizable character in my mind.”

On her process: “Finishing was more difficult. Each piece was slathered in handmade gesso (as a painter I found this irresistible) which I, afterwards, hated the look of, and my mind began to rebel against the strong impulse to revert and treat the objects like complicated painting surfaces… I found that muriatic acid chemically reacts with the calcium carbonate in my gesso, which was a fantastic freak of chance. Pieces were soon smashed apart and reassembled after some decoration or other interfered with what best identified them as characters. I used every last scrap of wood from the bundles. They became very much like little friends.”       

Some qualities of Goode’s paintings emerge in the sculptural work: a fierce dedication to abstraction, an eagerness to let paint look like paint, a palette of bright on white. But the experience is entirely different. These objects share space with us, jut out and gesture at us, pose and bow. They seem to have distinct personalities. “They’re My Friends, I Made Them” opens Friday, December 4th and is on view through January 30th at Three30Forty in Oakland, California.