SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jessica Silverman will host a solo exhibition by Pae White, titled “Slow Winter Sun.” Opening on January 13, 2023, the show will include new tapestries, paper clay paintings, and ceramic works. Through her three-decade career, the Californian artist has enjoyed numerous institutional shows, public art projects, and commissions. Her work is collected by museums around the world. White has joined the Jessica Silverman gallery roster.
White coaxes magic from humble materials, transforming clay, paper and yarn into gracious, otherworldly objects. Central to her practice is the influence of her life in California—from the thriving studio craft movement of Pasadena where she was brought up to the coastal ecology and erudite design of Sea Ranch.
The artist’s interest in the tension between the handmade and advanced industrial processes is evident in five large-scale tapestries. Using cashmere, cotton and metallic threads, White creates lustrous surfaces that celebrate nature’s fleeting temporality. Embroidered motifs including rain clouds, trees, mice, fireflies, and snails draw out a dialogue between the wandering wild and the regimented machine. As White explains, “a Jacquard loom is a beast of an industrial machine. I love denying what it does, removing the repetition, and transforming its mindless speed into an intentional, thoughtful result.”
The show will also feature paper-clay paintings with ornately textured facades inspired by weaving. The 8x6 foot highly saturated painted surface of RUBEDO JUBILEE looks like red satin-velvet, molded over a complex bas-relief pattern of alphabetical letters and shapes.
Transformation is further explored in White’s “Undoing Done” sculptures of ceramic serpentine forms climbing and descending wooden columns. Using her signature glazing process (a PVD vacuum chamber with extreme pressure and temperature), the artist creates a gemstone-like surface that shifts in color as the viewer moves around the work. Using this process, White has also made, for the first time, two functional ceramic clocks.
White’s inventive art explores metamorphosis with a droll trompe l’oeil sensibility that merges a grounded sense of nature with a whimsical aptitude for cosmic experimentation.
Pae White (b. 1963, Pasadena, CA) received her MFA from Art Center College of Design and BA from Scripps College. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at museums and other public institutions, including: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; SITE, Santa Fe; Art Institute of Chicago; The Power Plant, Toronto; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; STPI, Singapore; Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken; MAK, Vienna; 53rd Venice Biennale; and Skulpturprojekte, Münster, among others. Her numerous commissions include major projects at the Oslo Opera House, Norway; Los Angeles International Airport; San José Museum of Art, CA; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Swiss Re Klubhaus, Zurich; Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; Bloomberg International Headquarters, London; and Berlin-Brandenburg Airport. White lives and works in Los Angeles.
