Pae White: In No Particular Order
Manchester City Art Gallery 1st July to 3rd September 2006
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Pae White: In No Particular Order
Manchester City Art Gallery 1st July to 3rd September 2006 |
Reviewed by Ricardo Reis
This is California-based Pae’s first solo exhibition, touring from her British gallery base at Milton Keynes.
The exhibition collects work from eight years, into a themed conceptual piece.
The title ‘In No Particular Order’ sets up many repercussions that run throughout the exhibition, in different guises. Take that title: the exhibition has a very orderly arrangement; as a whole the concept is very mapped and structured.
The large room has been meticulously prepared, the walls awash with undersea colour. And here is just one of her many disjunctions: the walls are colour-toned from mid-deep blue of sea, shallowing to white as we traverse the room, that is, not the depth/height of the exhibition space, but its length/circumference.
To emphasise the sea theme ‘The Sea’ is repeatedly stencilled, like a da-do rail, along one side wall, the deep end. Meticulously lettered, calling on her extensive work in commercial sectors; no two letters alike in patterning or colouration. This eye for detail and completeness marks all her work.
The suspended sculptures are striking, and supplemented with two huge specially woven tapestries that depict very carefully rendered translations of a computer scanned large crinkled ball of silver foil: a whole world, in effect, complete with topography.
The suspensions, of various sizes, are close constructs of coloured fabric thread, ceiling to floor, carrying in their lower sections overlaid discs and ovals of, again, domestic materials. No two alike. Each thread must contain about ten such suspended pieces. All are carefully lit.
The smaller sculptures, in particular ‘Chocolate Mint Almost’ in the deep-sea section of the room capture the fall of light through water into fronds of weed perfectly. It is significant we can identify these images, even those of us who have not snorkelled: they are Cousteau, Jaws, every holiday brochure; they have become deep images of wonder, the subconscious landscape of origin.
Note the title of this piece; and the other, the great undulating bank of ‘Chartwell’ (is this a reference to the famous school in California?). The overall colour theme is suggestive of rare rosy coral.
Note the title of the exhibition. Note that the deep-sea room section contains ‘bird cages’, suspended wire meshes containing domestic newspaper cuttings, general human ephemera of industrial origin, cut-outs of women’s magazine faces: flotsam. For these are, in effect, lobster pots; and what creature may seem less aerial than bottom crawlers, lobsters.
Here also are the huge coppery slabs of Perspex. They are like huge paving stones, but translucent; in carefully lighted areas they shimmer and gleam. They were made to catch the accidentals of their material, the flaws and flows.
Around the entrance walls, particularly the shallow section, what we may call the shore line, are recent works: framed spider web art pieces. Their impact is in the use of real web, spray-painted, and presented on colour-toned backgrounds: professionalism.
I keep coming back to those ‘bird cages’, and trapped within them, the women’s faces, recipes… those box-like shapes. Are they houses, apartments, gendered structures? Each sunk in the cultural epoch; and the ogre that guards them, the lobster, a patriarchal social ogre?
And I wonder, the way the light falls on the strings of ‘Chocolate Mint Almost’, is there something of Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St Theresa’? That the flight and flow of technique, art, of the whole persona of the exhibition, has an autobiographical element, an epiphany that maybe ‘Mint Chocolate Almost’ registers?
There is an element of chaos in all this order: the accidentals of the paving pieces, the movement of air as we pass the suspensions sending shadows shimmering and suggestive.
There are also the titles, the ‘Almost’ of ‘Chocolate Mint’. The spider webs are ‘found’ objects, and like the suspended discs etc each unique; the element of chance that permutations create is all at work here. There is almost, dare I say, a playfulness too.
Pae White is proficient in fine arts, product design, urban planning and architecture, typography, graphics…. If there is playfulness then it is a sophisticated playfulness.
Also on display is a glass cabinet documenting all the sources of the cutouts, and ideas for the pieces in the exhibition. And, in another room, a short film interview/doc with Pae White, that is revealing as well as enigmatic.