Jan 21 - March 2, 2012
VAN HORN, Düsseldorf
Wendy White has described the look of her works as ‘retro yet futuristic, inherently urban, reactive and rebellious, but also humble and DIY’. There are echoes of experiences familiar from everyday life—roadside billboards caught out of the corner of your eye as you speed by on the highway, cinematic dissolves, or debris from a building renovation. For White, the artistic process begins with the construction of the canvas support; it can be a single rectangle, or several of them abutted to form an irregular, non-rectangular array. The painting can be hung on the wall, or it can lean against the wall from the floor. One canvas may be ‘framed’ by another or a canvas may be “crowned” by a wooden construction. As for the pictorial marks themselves, they are primarily made using an airbrush. There is an inevitable association with spraypaint graffiti, but with greatly expanded possibilities. —text by Barry Schwabsky, Vitamin P2
Radio Lampor refers to a section of the Advertising Mast in the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. Designed by architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, the mast held text-based signage on a massive metal frame, the first of its kind and a beacon of the Functionalist style. My paintings incorporate the idea of free-standing signage—words floating against sky, or in my case, atmospheric passages. My intention in using text is not to require the viewer to “read;” for me, the abstraction of words and phrases is a way to describe the cobbled-together, intuitively driven registering of signs and symbols that occurs in daily life, the kind that goes beyond momentary recognition and enters the realm of subconscious synthesis. It’s similar to seeing only part of a billboard from a speeding car—you can usually tell if it’s an ad for a bank, or a car dealership, often from just a glimpse—it’s a very right-now, in-the-cultural-moment, almost involuntary understanding of something based on very little, but very crucial, information. —Wendy White, 2012