Clementine Gallery
623 West 27th Street, 212-243-5937
Chelsea
October 20 - November 25, 2006
Reception: Friday, October 20, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
For his third solo exhibition at the gallery, White presents a large-scale sculptural installation titled I’m Lost on a Spaceship Momma, along side a series of acrylic paintings on found lithographs. Interested in exploring the escapist nature of these mass-produced landscapes, White disrupts their idyllic banality with scraps of three-dimensional text. Perched on the balance between absurdity and profundity, the messages inscribed onto the paintings infer both a post-modern art world critique and a sardonic sense of self-doubt. Statements like Sexy Paintings by Sexy Painters for Sexy People, You’re Just Agreeing With Me So I’ll Shut Up, or simply Art Jail can be seen as what White calls “existential cries into the wilderness”, aimed at getting “at something comic but also kind of real too… something melancholy and true”.
At the same time, the typeface of the text itself is often stylized to the point of illegibility. Stretched across the canvas in a succession of gravity defying undulations, the words twist and turn into surrealist letter forms that exist as much as sculptural objects as they do language. White approaches I’m Lost on a Spaceship Momma, a monumental construction of cut wooden letters, with similar intent. Eight feet tall at it’s highest point, the perspectively rendered sentiment slices through the back wall of the main gallery into the project room, dominating the gallery and further evolving White’s exploration of architectural space.