This project featured an index of visual archetypes: vector images of black rainbows, rain clouds with suspended drops, hearts shaped from chunky pixels, oversized rain droplets, and distorted peace signs. Despite their roots in popular culture, phone apps, and video games, White’s chosen motifs lack one immediate, coherent referent. Instead they hover in a liminal space, one of psychological connections rather than real world anchors. The simplicity and recognizability of hearts and rainbows (universal placeholders for optimism and positivity) belies a deeper construct regarding the mutability of symbols themselves. How can signs and symbols accumulate and translate ideas about the world? These heavy-duty cutouts communicate from a non-logocentric space wherein the particular anxieties of childhood, adolescence and adulthood intersect depending on the viewer’s perspective.

The title Highs and Lows (Double Happiness) alludes to an emotional duality—the alternating of apex and nadir that defines a post-adolescent realm; the aforementioned “let downs” of childhood dreams versus the emotional maturity required to navigate adulthood. This concept is underscored by the physical balancing act of the mobile’s construction, in which industrial materials and hardware are vaguely reminiscent of a mechanical or athletic setting.