2 June – 2 July 2016
Fiona Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Jorge Mendez Blake, Pae White & Paul Winstanley
Jan Albers, John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, Fiona Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Jorge Mendez Blake, Liliana Moro, Jorge Pardo, Jessica Stockholder, SUPERFLEX, Kerry Tribe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paul Winstanley & Pae White
Re/Production
12 July - 2 August , 2014
Jan Albers
Fiona Banner
Fiona Connor
SUPERFLEX
Pae White
Pae White’s prolific and diverse oeuvre focuses on the forgotten and ephemeral qualities of everyday life. Exploring different material forms and contexts, White’s practice is known for blurring the traditional and often nebulous boundaries between the fine and applied arts, architecture and design. Whether in the form of sculpture, site-specific installations, tapestries, animation, or painting, White’s works subverts viewers’ expected relationship to familiar objects, processes and spaces.
Pae White (b. 1963 in Pasadena, CA) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and institutions worldwide including at STPI, Singapore (2021); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (2019), Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken (2017), MAK, Vienna (2013); Langen Foundation, Düsseldorf (2013); South London Gallery, London (2013); The Power Plant, Toronto (2011); SITE, Santa Fe (2011); The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2011); St Louis Art Museum, St Louis (2010); 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009); Skulpturprojekte, Münster (2007); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2007); Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2006) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2004). She has created public commissions at Swiss Re Klubhaus, Zurich (2018-2020); Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (2017); Broadway Pier, San Diego (2014) and Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, Berlin (2012), among others. Her work is included in prominent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Pae White lives and works in Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.
Periodically, the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books embarks on a seemingly straightforward project: to present an exhibition reflecting on the state of contemporary printmaking. This catalog shows images from the work in the exhibition as well as several interviews, including Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ISBN: 978-0-87070-825-1
White's 2010 solo show at The Power Plant, 'Pae White: Material Mutters,' surveys her work from the past five years in a range of media, with a focus on her monumental tapestries. The exhibition and catalogue feature the new work Sea Beast (2010), which was commissioned by The Power Plant as a part of our Annual Commissioning Program begun in 2006. Sea Beast is a large-scale tapestry featuring an image of a found macrame wall hanging, which signals a new visual direction in her work - its source is a three-dimensional scan of a woven form that includes mussel shells, a price tag and tassels. Blown up and transformed, its own weave interpreted within another, the macrame simultaneously escapes and retains the sub-cultural associations that previously defined it.
This eighty-page hardcover catalogue is designed by White and Juliette Bellocq who previously collaborated with the artist on her catalogue, Pae White: Lisa Bright and Dark. The catalogue features an overview of White's exhibition with a specific focus on Sea Beast. Along with high-resolution images of this and past exhibitions, this catalogue includes a visual overview of White's ever-evolving practice, and a cloth cover with a foil treatment that reflects the pattern White produced for her piece, Future Fabric (2010). Alongside the unique cover and stunning images is an insightful essay by German professor, art historian, art critic, and curator Oliver Zybok, as well as an incisive and frenetic take on White's tapestries by writer Susan Emerling.
Pae White: Material Mutters
Introduction by: Gregory Burke
Essays by: Susan Emerling and Oliver Zybok
Publisher: The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 2010
Hard cover, 80 pages, full colour
ISBN: 978-1-894212-32-8
Pae White
Spacemanship
The book details Pae White’s largest production in Germany to date to show how the artist turns rooms into total works of art: Spacemanship is an installation and a quote from her so-called “Supergraphics,” façade designs with which she explored the utopian planned community Sea Ranch, California, in a comprehensive installation. In addition to this in-situ piece, White also presented three large mobiles and a 128-foot-long tapestry. Documenting these works, the book illustrates her imposing practice. With essays by Roland Mönig and Ernest W. Uthemann as well as a conversation between Pae White and Daniel Berndt. Published by Distanz.
ISBN 978-3-95476-347-4
108 pages, 55 color images, Hardcover
Artists on Art: Pae White on Christopher Dresser
Pae White wrestles in her work with the distinction between so-called high art and functional objects. At times she renders everyday objects in unexpected materials, like her larger-than-life marble popcorn sculptures, while also utilizing commercial materials, as with her chandeliers and mobiles made out of string, cut paper, and greeting cards. A Pasadena native, Pae White received her MFA from Art Center College of Design and now lives and works in Los Angeles.
For Artists on Art, LACMA’s online video series featuring contemporary artists speaking on objects of their choice from our permanent collection, White selected Christopher Dresser’s Soup Tureen and Ladle (c. 1877–78). Today, curator of modern art Carol S. Eliel speaks to White about her relationship to the object, a version of which she bought for herself many years ago at a thrift store (LACMA’s has ebonized wood fittings while her own has ivory).
You are an artist who also makes functional objects and really blurs, blends, and effaces the distinction between those two, so I’m curious what it is about this functional yet beautiful object yet sculpture that appeals to you. What made you choose this soup tureen and ladle to talk about?
I think this is an incredibly sexy object, and I think this object, designed by Christopher Dresser around 1880 in England, is a very practical idea of the soup tureen that has just slight moves that make that whole process incredibly rapturous and poetic. I’m one who believes that, depending on the quality of the glass or the lightness of something, you behave with an object differently if it has these special moments. In this case, the turn and thickness of the ladle deliver the soup in a very specific way. Everything has been carefully thought out: the termination points, the tapers—all are very well considered. And there is a hole [in the lid] that allows for the ladle to tuck in perfectly, so there's this beautiful consideration for the thickness of the ladle handle. I think all of this is worth noting: the fact that this is a pleasure in the hand, and all these points have a resolution that is extremely satisfying to actually hold, as well as this sort of seductive hardware.
Pae White on Turning a New Wing of Germany’s Saarlandmuseum Into a Technicolor Spacecraft by Naomi Rea
Polyester yarn was key to constructing this 45-foot-tall installation.
The Modern Gallery of the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken, Germany, reopened to the public on Saturday after a year-and-a-half-long closure for the construction of an extension, designed by Berlin architects Kuehn Malvezzi.
An exhibition of new works by the American artist Pae White inaugurates the museum’s new wing, which adds eight rooms and an additional 1,500 square meters of exhibition space. White is known for her large-scale installations and her multimedia work, which has appeared in the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
On Saturday she unveiled her latest work, Spacemanship, a site-specific, super-graphic intervention that plays with the architecture of the new wing and completely fills its 45-foot-tall atrium. The work was created in situ and was designed around the space so that it is visible from every floor of the building.