'Made by Hand/Born Digital' exhibition explores art that confounds an analog v. digital divide

Pae White | ArtDaily

Pae White, Phosphenes 1, 2011, ink and clay on wood, 17.75 x 17.75 inches, 45.1 x 45.1 cm.

By ArtDaily

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) exhibition Made by Hand/Born Digital features 12 artworks and 9 artists who use brushes, AI, paint, 3D printers, scissors, magazines printed on paper, digital looms, potter’s wheels, Photoshop, and Apple Photo. By continuing to craft ceramics, paintings, and textiles by hand and also using the latest digital tools, many of the artists in the exhibition blur a distinction between the handmade and digital. Collectively, these artists remind us that computers are tools—exquisitely complicated but still tools—made by and for humans.

They allow artists to work faster, experiment before committing precious time and materials, toss the dice of chance to see what AI might conjure, or easily produce minutely wrought labor-intensive details. Their art demonstrates that silicon-based intelligence and our carbon-based mammalian brains can and do work together as well as suggesting an alternative to inevitable digitization of everything. With a mixture of recent museum acquisitions and loans of artworks by Alex Heilbron, Taha Heydari, Yassi Mazandi, Justin Mortimer, Analia Saban, Ena Swansea, Sarah Rosalena, Joey Watson, and Pae White, this exhibition shows that the traditional mediums—painting, ceramics, and weaving—can incorporate the methods offered by digital technologies to erode a clean distinction between the digital and handmade. Perhaps, the biggest lesson is to ignore hype about the latest transformational gadget or app and, instead, pay attention to what artists are really doing with technology and see how they channel cutting edge tools to deal with the age-old struggle of giving concrete visual form to ideas and pictures inside their minds.

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Pae White's Qwalala at Claremont McKenna College

Pae White | Claremont McKenna College

A 250-foot-long glass sculpture known as Qwalala and created by American artist Pae White, will be unveiled on Claremont McKenna College’s campus on Sept. 20th as the latest installment in the campus’ public art program.

 

“Qwalala is a stunning new addition to Claremont McKenna’s campus and our Public Arts Program which seeks to integrate arts into all aspects of campus life and augment and enhance our core institutional values as a residential liberal arts college,” said Kimberly Shiring, director of the program.

“For an artist, it is a unique opportunity to create for a college campus,” said White, a 1985 graduate of Scripps College. “Not only are colleges active at night, but they also are home to minds that are inquisitive and open.”

The artwork’s name is derived from the Pomo tribe describing the meandering path of the Gualala River on the northern coast of California. Comprised of more than 1,500 glass bricks, each weighing nearly 40 pounds and hand-forged by Italian artisans in a palette of 26 colors, the sculpture reaches nearly 8-feet-tall at its highest point and features two archways. Qwalala changes visually throughout the day as light and shadows cast upon clear and colored glass bricks, creating a “storm”-like effect of swirling color, while remaining transparent.

“The piece began as an exploration of dematerializing the massive, finding a way to complicate the solidity of a brick by merging it with something more ephemeral, like a scent or cloud or a passing storm,” White said. "My work has often involved capturing the fleeting, immaterial—things easily overlooked, neglected, or forgotten—and exposing them, elevating them, even monumentalizing them. In this piece, the neutral anonymity of a masonry wall disappears, replaced by a spectrum of individual, and somewhat uncertain elements of storm bricks.”

The seventh addition to the College’s Public Art Program, Qwalala was supported by several members of the CMC Board of Trustees and representatives of the College’s Public Art Subcommittee. Since 2015, the Public Art Program has enriched CMC’s campus, with works by Chris Burden, Carol Bove, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeppe Hein, and Mary Weatherford.

The sculpture’s dedication is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, Sept. 20th, at 5:30 p.m. at Claremont McKenna College, Mid Quad, 888 N Columbia Ave, Claremont, CA 91711.

FIRST PERMANENT PUBLIC WORKS IN LONDON FROM UGO RONDINONE, PAE WHITE & CATHERINE YASS COMING TO PADDINGTON SQUARE.

Pae White | FAD Magazine

Pae White. COURTESY: © Pae White / PHOTOGRAPH: Enrico Fiorese

By Mark Westall

Paddington Square, London’s new quarter for work, retail and dining at the heart of Paddington’s regeneration, has announced a major programme of public art commissions, comprising first London permanent public works by internationally renowned artists Ugo Rondinone, Pae White and Catherine Yass. The artworks will be unveiled with the full opening of Paddington Square in 2022.

“The Paddington Square public art programme acts as a conversation starter: to demonstrate and inspire the power, beauty, potential and responsibility of curating art in the public realm. Our curatorial approach takes its cues from the vision of Sellar, together with Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s architectural ambition to bring one of London’s biggest transport gateways to life through public spaces and contemporary art. Lacuna conducted extensive research into the neighbourhood, working with local communities and engaging with a diverse set of stakeholders, greatly enriching our curatorial approach and the development of these landmark commissions with leading international artists. While lockdown presented us with new challenges, it also allowed us to develop novel methods for critical engagement with the evolving cultural conversation, which visitors will see borne out in the final works as they are unveiled in 2022.” - Stella Ioannou (Director) & Jade Niklai (Associate Curator), Lacuna.

San José Museum of Art Announces 86 New Acquisitions by 27 Artists

Pae White | Artfix Daily

Noisy Blushes (2020) Installation view at San José Museum of Art, photo by Fredrick Nilsen

Noisy Blushes (2020) Installation view at San José Museum of Art, photo by Fredrick Nilsen

“Building on SJMA’s commitment to celebrate the creative impact in the South Bay, this group of acquisitions features Pae White’s Noisy Blushes (2020), the largest artist’s commission in the Museum’s history. The sculpture comprises 12,000 hexagonal stainless-steel disks suspended within SJMA’s atrium and unveiled to the public in October 2020 to celebrate the Museum’s 50th anniversary.”

San Jose Museum of Art Announces New Commission by Pae White

Pae White | Artfix Daily

Pae White, Noisy Blushes, 2020. Image: Fredrik Nilsen

Pae White, Noisy Blushes, 2020. Image: Fredrik Nilsen

The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) announced a new commission by California artist Pae White. Commissioned to usher in the next 50 years of creative impact at SJMA, this new work will soar within the Museum’s thirty-foot high atrium and greet audiences. This site-specific work will be the artist’s second largest mobile completed to date and the most ambitious commission in SJMA’s history. Unveiled in September 2020, Noisy Blushes will be on view through the building’s glass façade until the Museum re-opens to the public. This will be White’s first public artwork at a cultural institution on the West Coast to be on long-term view.

In creating her colorful and dazzling mobiles, White looks to the natural world—flocks of birds, schools of fish, drifting clouds—to produce sculptures without volume, to find order within chaos, and to meditate on movement and time. With this commission, White celebrates the mundane, the overlooked, and the ephemeral with a glittering, shape-shifting orb that will deliver a sublime experience for visitors and transform the Museum’s entrance into a new place for art.

For SJMA, White has created a sphere composed of over 12,000 silkscreened, electroplated stainless-steel hexagonal disks and suspended from over 500 hundred cables that float behind a towering glass façade. Her mesmerizing mobile will scatter millions of reflections throughout the Museum’s spacious Harold Witkin Convocation Area and Frank L. and Edna E. Di Napoli Skybridge Gallery. The colors of the mobile—hot pink, coral, crimson, turquoise, fuchsia, sea green, periwinkle, and more—sweep through the sculpture through an effect White calls a “blush.” Hues of gold, silver, and rose dominate, acknowledging the entwined histories of quicksilver mining in the town of New Almaden in south San José and the California Gold Rush of the High Sierras.

“Pae White’s bold new commission mirrors SJMA’s commitment to experimentation and innovation and reminds us how great art transcends the immediate events of its time. We are thrilled that this will be the first thing visitors will see when SJMA can reopen,” said S. Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director, San José Museum of Art. “White has worked closely with SJMA curator, Rory Padeken, and Richard Karson, director of design and the exhibitions team, to realize this artwork. We are grateful to them for this collaboration as well as the 120 members of the Bay Area community who generously supported this project.”

SJMA presented a selection of new and recent artworks by Pae White as part of its exhibition series, Beta Space, from July 2019 to January 2020. Plans for the commission began in 2017 and developed concurrently with the exhibition, which included a smaller mobile as proof of concept for the larger sculpture in the atrium. The mobile is site-specific and created by White to work within a space that connects SJMA’s nineteenth-century historic wing with its modern addition and offers multiple points of view from below and from above. White also riffs on Conceptual art and Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt by incorporating a few miniaturized versions of his large-scale, geometric wall drawings with designs of her own making into the piece. “Over the years, White has increasingly relied on the use of custom software along with designers, fabricators, artisans, and craftspeople from around the world, maximizing their expertise to create her art.” said Rory Padeken, curator, San José Museum of Art. “This method of working is quite commonplace in Silicon Valley where innovation is driven by creativity as a shared value that transcends disciplines and industries. With this artwork, White elegantly merges sophisticated technologies with inventive processes and the effect is ravishing.”

Pae White shared, “Noisy Blushes embraces visual ambiguity. A site-specific artwork, it simultaneously reflects light and color, yet denies its material presence: although viewable from a multitude of angles, its essence remains fugitive, ever changing depending upon the viewer location, the time of day, even the time of year. I am interested in the play between massiveness and transience, the elusivity of form.”    

"Noisy Blushes" by Pae White at San Jose Museum of Art

Pae White | San Francisco Chronicle Datebook | by Tony Bravo

12_sjma_paewhite_noisyblushes_photo_by_fredrik-nilsen-studio_50380567471_o.jpg

The San José Museum of Art is set to debut a new mobile installation by California artist Pae White in honor of its 50th anniversary.

This site-specific work, titled “Noisy Blushes,” was installed in the museum’s 30-foot atrium and can be seen through the building’s glass facade until SJMA reopens to the public.

The massive floating sphere is comprised of more than 12,000 silkscreened, electroplated stainless-steel hexagonal disks, all suspended from over 500 hundred cables. The mobile scatters millions of reflections throughout the space in shades of hot pink, coral, crimson, turquoise, fuchsia, sea green and periwinkle in what White calls a “blush” effect.

Hues of gold, silver, and rose dominate the piece as an acknowledgement of the entwined histories of quicksilver mining in the town of New Almaden in south San José, as well as the California Gold Rush of the High Sierras.  The piece is White’s second largest mobile to date.

Pae White: Material History

Pae White | Sculpture Magazine | Kim Beil

Whistleblower (detail), 2019. Ink, cable, and electroplated steel, 3189 discs, 295 strands, 84.5 x 189 x 74 in.

Whistleblower (detail), 2019. Ink, cable, and electroplated steel, 3189 discs, 295 strands, 84.5 x 189 x 74 in.

She leads me to a series of freestanding cases, nearly 30 feet in length, which house AGAMEMNOMICS (2013). Hundreds of small, multicolored objects stand in regiments, organized in rows that repeat deep into the mirrored base of the vitrine. This is a selection of work made for White’s intervention at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK). She recalls, “I went down to the basement [at the MAK], and there were these insanely incredible pieces by Adolf Loos and Koloman Moser that I was supposed to consider doing an intervention with, but I kept looking at this box of toys in the darkness of a cabinet. Some were kind of broken. I realized they were never going to be seen because they didn’t have any attribution. I felt immediately protective and melancholic about the toys and so I took them as my subject.” As in the Velveteen Rabbit, White’s attention to these objects brings them new life.

Describing the project’s early stages, she explains: “I narrowed down the box of toys to an easy matrix, sort of a chess set, then assigned each object its role in the chess configuration. 

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An early start to celebrating the US centennial of women’s suffrage: San Jose Museum of Art celebrates visionary female artists

Pae White | The Art Newspaper | By Jori Finkel

Pae White, Beta Space, Installation view at San Jose Museum of Art, 2019.

Pae White, Beta Space, Installation view at San Jose Museum of Art, 2019.

Women gained the right to vote through the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in August 1920, and various cultural groups are getting ready to celebrate that centennial with themed events and exhibitions. But the San Jose Museum of Art got an early start, framing 2019 as the “year of visionary women artists.”

The institution kicked off the program in the spring with a pair of shows, one focusing on Jay DeFeo’s use of photography and another on the contemporary artist Catherine Wagner’s science-inspired imaging (think prints made from MRI machines). Currently on view at the museum, which marks its 50th anniversary this fall, is the first mid-career retrospective of the Calcutta-born, New York-based artist Rina Banerjee and new work by the Los Angeles artist Pae White.

“When you’re getting ready for an anniversary, you start mining your history to see what you want to celebrate, and for us it’s our visionary women founders and these women artists we wanted to show,” says the museum’s executive director, Susan Sayre Batton. She said the other impetus was the centennial of the votes in the US House and Senate for women’s suffrage in May and June of 1919. 

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Pae White: Beta Space

San Jose Museum of Art

San Jose, CA

18 July 2019 - 19 January 2020

Los Angeles-based artist Pae White transcends nearly all traditional boundaries—between art and design; craft and fine art; theory and materiality. Her curiosity with the world reveals itself in her transformation of ordinary objects into profoundly transient experiences that defy logic, yet remain oddly familiar. White will present a compendium of recent projects for the sixth iteration of the exhibition series “Beta Space.” Launched in 2011, this series encourages artistic risk taking and experimentation, serves as an incubator for new ideas, and fosters creative opportunities as well as links within our community.

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