Smoke and Mirrors
Pasadena-born Pae White has earned international acclaim for her artworks that turn everyday objects into “an invitation to marvel.”
By Nancy Spiller 02/01/2010
Multi-media artist Pae (pronounced “pay”) White may be one of Pasadena’s better-kept cultural secrets, but in international circles, she’s garnering accolades for her colorful installations, sculptures and mixed-media wall works that playfully intersect the worlds of art and design. And events continue to conspire against the third-generation native maintaining her low local profile.
White will be among a handful of Los Angeles artists in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, opening Feb. 25 and running through May 30. The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, which attempts to identify the key currents in contemporary American art, is always among the art world’s most prestigious, and this year, it’s even more selective: The recession has pared down the number of participants to 55, down from 100 during the bubble year of 2006.
The show comes on the heels of three milestones for White last fall: She covered chandeliers with birdseed and lifted spirits at the 53rd Venice Biennale, had a major solo exhibit at Mills College Art Museum in Oakland and stole Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts’ 20th-anniversary show with her heroic tapestries of smoke plumes and crumpled aluminum foil, a clever turn on the “smoke and mirrors” concept, as the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight noted. Calling “Smoke Knows” and “Colored Crinkle” “two knockout works,” Knight wrote, “White’s gorgeous pair of enormous woven tapestries” were “an invitation to marvel.”
Jay Belloli, the Armory’s director of gallery programs, first became aware of White’s work when she did a Vaseline cake for the center’s 1998 show In The Polka Dot Kitchen. He considers her a conceptual powerhouse and “one of the most important artists of her generation in Los Angeles.”
At Casa Cuadrada, the Montecito Heights home she collaborated on with her architect-husband, Tom Marble, White greets a visitor with an easy smile and eyes wonder-wide. (Her birth name is Cynthia, but she prefers the ambiguity of her childhood nickname.) She’s dressed tomboy casual in blue jeans, a black sweater and distressed cowboy boots, her long, thick hair pulled back in a ponytail. At her side is KeeBee, the mixed-breed rescue dog who arrived at her Highland Park studio as a puppy.
White’s home worktable features a small model of the Venetian pavilion in which she suspended a colorful open-weave “ceiling” of silk thread, hung birdseed-covered chandeliers at eye level and left the building’s doors and windows open as “an invitation to the birds.” Not that she wanted them held captive inside the piece she titled “Weaving, Unsung.”
“I hate real animals being used in artwork,” she says. Instead, she invited competitive Italian bird callers to create the illusion of an avian presence for the first week of the show last June. “It added to the lore of the piece,” she notes. “They were there and then they were gone.”
Invited to participate in the Biennale’s Making Worlds show by curator Daniel Birnbaum, White came up with the idea for her piece during her first visit to the space in January. “It was a cold and foggy night and felt to me like the attic of an eccentric who might keep birds,” she says. White’s cheeky offerings weren’t inspired by the chandelier-heavy locale of Venice; rather, they represent a format she has worked with for years. Fabricated in Lithuania from terracotta and then painted in flat, solid colors such as black or red, their “crystal” facets subtly reflect the play of light. “They automatically read as something traditional,” she says. Three hang over a midcentury table and chairs in her book-lined dining room, and one is on public view at Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles headquarters.
Much of her work incorporates quotidian elements — used foil, junk mail, fallen leaves or a plume of smoke monumentalized in tapestry form. “My interest,” she says, “is in freeze-framing something elusive, something that’s barely even there. For instance, the point cloud animation created from 3D scans of a dying 800-year-old oak tree [a mesmerizing installation in her Mills exhibit] is unbelievably intimate, yet no physical interaction with the tree ever took place. I could not touch it; it was too fragile.”
Also in the Mills show were handcrafted sycamore leaves scattered throughout two galleries. “These are the gutter leaves, the debris,” she says. “It’s a portrait of a place that’s completely transitional, what’s about to go away… the quintessential portrait of California in October.”
Interpretation of White’s work can be elusive. She shys away from set explanations, preferring that viewers “come up with their own story for the art. I take more from artwork that keeps telling me things, reminding me of different things, that has loose ends.”
Asked if contemporary art may be speaking to an increasingly smaller audience, she’s quick to reply: “The last thing I want is a consensus. It’s the kiss of death… I don’t know if my work sets out for some big appeal. You get a high-level education with an emphasis on theory, and sure, there’s a level of elitism in that, and you pay a lot of money to get that. Someone who doesn’t have that can approach the work and get whatever meaning they want. You can have a small audience. That’s okay, too.”
Her own education in contemporary art came early in life. Born in 1963 to a father who worked for the Mars Candy Company and a culturally engaged homemaker–mom, White was raised in the Linda Vista and Arroyo areas of Pasadena. “I have a very clear memory of Warhol’s show — the Marilyns and the Brillo boxes,” she says of the seminal 1970 Pasadena Museum of Art exhibit she visited at age 7. “Warhol made me realize I could see something other than a painting in a museum. That was incredibly
liberating for me.”
Highly influential as well was the “magic box” filled with glitter, beads, crayons and paint an aunt gave her for Christmas. She remembers it as “an art studio in a box,” which she kept, like buried treasure, under her bed between creative sessions. White took high school classes at Art Center College of Design and earned her undergraduate degree at Scripps College in Claremont, where she studied painting — miserably. “I didn’t have the talent for making the paintings I thought I should be making,” she recalls. She returned home to Art Center for her MFA, completing it in 1991.
“Art Center was criticized as being cold, conceptual and businesslike,” she says. “That was exactly what I needed. I think it’s irresponsible to get an art education without having a business discussion. At Art Center, it was discussed as a profession, rather than a hobby. Art Center was dismissed as a trade school. It was under the radar.” There she studied with conceptual mischief-maker Mike Kelly and worked for him for five years. After graduating, she did set decorating and art direction for commercials, films and music videos.
Her fine art practice now keeps her busy full time. White is represented by two galleries in Los Angeles — 1301 PE and China Art Objects Galleries — and several in Europe, but none in New York. “I don’t believe an artist must have New York representation to have an art career,” she says. “Los Angeles is home to some of the best art schools in the country. Because of this, the city is a hotbed of post-grads who remain in the city and contribute to a dynamic and experimental atmosphere which makes the city a true art destination.”
The international network of fabricators who turn her concepts into reality include the Belgian tapestry factory with a digital loom that John Nava used for his Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels project in downtown L.A. She engaged them in her four-year-long effort to complete the 36-by-119-foot stage curtain commissioned for the new Oslo Opera House, created using photographic images of crumpled aluminum foil. She included hints of the theater’s colored seats “so the audience would feel themselves reflected in it.” She worked hard, as well, at trying to achieve a “neutral flow” in the aluminum foil. “I didn’t want anyone to see Abe Lincoln’s face in it or anything,” she says with a laugh. A serendipitous fingerprint, however, now serves as her signature on the piece.
Looking toward the future, White is keeping her own options open. When she grows weary of the project-management aspect of her current work, she contemplates a simpler relationship with art. “I have a desire to return to painting, to doing something quiet, intimate, direct, small and contained — and that doesn’t require FedEx or checking on the status of anything online!”
Nancy Spiller is author of Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes), Counterpoint, 2009.
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