Wendy White

Laguna Seca

Aug 1 - Sept 7, 2026

Gaa Gallery Catskill

Gaa is pleased to present Laguna Seca, a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based Wendy White (b. 1971 in Deep River, CT). This is the artist's fourth solo presentation with the gallery and her first in our new Catskill location.

 

Taking its title from the historic Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, CA - a circuit built atop an ancient dry lakebed - the exhibition considers a place where geological time, climate, and engineered speed converge. White takes this condition as both subject and structure, using painting to move between landscape and image, surface and trace, atmosphere and construction. Across painting and sculpture, White develops a visual language of atmospheric color, exposed structure, and recurring symbols. Desert-toned grounds meet the bright synthetic colors of advertising graphics and racing imagery, producing compositions that feel both weathered and highly charged.

 

At the center of the exhibition are two large-scale works, Laguna Húmeda and Laguna Seca, which establish a dialogue between opposing environmental conditions: humidity and drought. In Laguna Húmeda, a cool teal field evokes the lingering presence of moisture, while a translucent vinyl window reveals the painting's exposed wooden framework alongside silhouetted forms of a palm tree and rain cloud, symbols of resilience, replenishment, and nurture. Laguna Seca is composed of stacked translucent vinyl panels washed with the dusty hues of an arid landscape. Completing the composition, a fluorescent yellow plexiglas quarter rainbow occupies the fourth quadrant, replacing the expected panel with a sculptural form that projects beyond the painting itself. Representing optimism and the conscious mind, the rainbow introduces the possibility of renewal into a landscape defined by dryness. Across both works, White makes the paintings’ internal structure visible using translucent vinyl to dissolve the boundary between image and object, surface and support.

 

White's Mood paintings distill the exhibition’s symbolic language into an intimate scale. Framed by softly sprayed canvases, translucent vinyl windows reveal exposed wooden supports and White’s recurring motifs that transform emotional states into shifting landscapes. Two circular Rainbow tondos extend this visual vocabulary. Bisected by a horizon line that references iceberg theory, they suggest that the visible self gives way to deeper, unspoken emotional states below the surface. Together, these works transform weather into psychological terrain, where color, transparency, and form become expressions of resilience, vulnerability, optimism, and reflection.

 

Suspended within the gallery, Mobile (Pleasure!) carries these recurring motifs into space. A pixelated heart, White's emblem of life and health in the digital realm, floats alongside a palm tree, rain cloud, and the word pleasure, echoing forms found throughout the exhibition. In gentle motion, the mobile extends White's visual language beyond the wall, giving physical movement to symbols that otherwise remain suspended within the paintings.

By revealing the structures beneath each work, White treats painting as something built rather than simply seen. Like the dry lakebed from which the exhibition takes its name, Laguna Seca holds onto what came before, even as it is continually repurposed.