This is one way to picture a mighty, massive California oak tree. It's an impression.
Another way is to take multiple scans using some sort of mapping software, then process the data in Dreamworks to create a light display, like a sprinkling of luminescence, tracing the tree's contours, turning and spinning, creating an animated picture that is at one and the same time on the surface and on the inside.
In Between the Outside-In is the title of Pae White's show at New Langton Arts, SF. The work was created during a residency in the California foothills sponsored by For-Site a foundation dedicated to encouraging new art about place. Pae White's installations typically engage in an architectural, design-based kind of way with the site of exhibition.
Like this, Morceau Accrochant, thread and paper, 2004. Gentle, colorful suspensions, grid-like and light-weight.
Similarly this, Suncloud, 2008, described as “a waterfall on pause." hmmm...
This earlier work, (2003) chandeliers in terra cotta, called foggy, sespe, chamois, lowered down and claimed space in the center of the place.
The show in New Langton included three pieces. Two were self-contained enclosures, rectangular glass and metal rooms upon which her Dreamworks animations were projected, reflected, refracted—swirling in and upon themselves.
The looping tree animation begins and ends with a topographical impression of the immense oak made from points of yellowish light. Your gaze travels in, in between the sight lines. At the same time, the form, contained in chains of light, moves over. In and around, while over and around—a morphing, swirling circuit—at once a fly-over and a deep dive. It is quite extraordinary going into the space of the tree, density of wood and bark transparent and the movement exhilarating. This is quantum physics made live.
Scintillation of light is how astrophysicists describe the tremulous motion that makes the twinkling of stars. This from the Latin, scintillea, sparks of light, which have been understood, well, from way back, in Jewish mysticism and Manichean Gnosticism, as soul sparks. "Fiery sparks of the soul of this world," the alchemist Khunrath describes them. "The light of nature sprinkled in and throughout the structures of the great world into all the fruits of the elements everywhere." mmm... oh yes. The digital revolution is making plain what sages have known intuitively and scientists theoretically. Everything is light.
Following on the tree, White took another scan, this of a wild raspberry bush, and similarly manipulated the data to produce a different effect—the image begins coalesced and then its bits expand out into an array of particle light, a dissipation, and then the sparks return back into form.
Behind the structural aspect of her work—whether establishing space with chandeliers or creating relational space with bits of color, or projecting form and space with light, image, reflection—is a concept of space that folds in on itself. "A world can be as small as your fingertip and can be endless..." she says in an interview about her work in the 2009 Venice Biennale. In Venice she manipulates the space of the site; in these animations, she manipulates the impression of a living form and the space it takes up.
The last piece in the show came out of an encounter with another being living in the Sierra foothills, collector Joseph Meade. White replicates the landscape of his home with pieces of his extensive collection of ceramic ware: hills and valleys formed from vases and pots, pools and meadows in low, flat bowls. It describes place and relationship, but is maybe not more than a curiosity. This thing of making a maguette out of non-ordinary materials has some kind of attraction. In any case, it's been done here, and before. In this case, I'd rather be in the place than the sculptural description of it.
The free-standing animation-rooms I could hang out in forever. Trance-inducing light-movies take my cake and bake it.
images courtesy of
Las Pilitas Nursery
Re-Title.com
Tate Museum
Francesca Kaufmann Gallery, Milan
Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels
Gravel & Gold blog.
