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LG White

 

Is a Dutch contemporary fine artist who has been based in the UK ( London) since 2010.

Inspired by poetry and music, LG's work references her life and surroundings. Often and always mischievious, her work encompasses a varied subject matter that is driven by her personal life experiences and her keen interest in history, politics, philosophy, literature, dance, film, science and pop culture.

 

Beautifully detailed pencil on card depictions of imagined landscapes are juxtaposed with a triptych of haunting photo

etchings. Skulls are transformed in homage to pop art in the form of comic book characters, then, in turn, LG's work progresses to reference contemporary Americana - the telephone, the silver dollar. The journey from the surreal landschape to photo-real objects is rich in LG's humour and wit, strewn with references to history, philosophy, film, pop culture and science.

 

 

Who is LG White?

 

(It is we who gaze on in dreamy silence...)

A personal presentation of the work of LG White

by Anthony Cook

 

 

Tell me. What is it when we think we see something, but we don’t? Or, when we see something, it is not really what we really feel? Roland Barthes in his ‘Chambre Claire’ points out that ‘images’ are meta-potentials and that photographic images are the absolute paradigm of this meta-potentiality. When we gaze upon the sister of Napoleon we see eyes that have seen the emperor and suddenly we are joined with him, cast back through time, sent reeling towards ourselves with a new perspective. It is the same when we see the image of JFK being blown away in Dallas. We have the references to many things but they are not interpretations. They are recordings. We see not only the subject but all the reality which surrounds and gives sense to, but most certainly does not depend on, the subject. This is not the rendering of a scene through the eyes of some corrupted, subjective filter but more precisely the actual scene intact, captured for all eternity in a neutral sense. The grass does not bother about the victim and the sun does not shine for the crime.....

Hegel stated that ART is the humanization of form. What does this mean? It means that an artist mentally attaches a form or a space to a time and place and a choice. So we do not just deal with common mental processes, rather we deal with an ego or a desire and this is a humanistic machine. So I wonder: if we took a photo of a chair and signed it, then would it, in time, through the creative act, become recognized as art? But what would it be if our subject was photography itself, if our work was to take photographs of photographs, would this still be seen as a viable art form? And further still, what if we took photographs of images, which as we know are not the same, would they have the same resonance as simple photographs? What if we were then to follow this process to its antithesis? What if one day, through a flash of inspiration, we were to simply return the lens/objective in a retro sense? What would this be? Would it be like the tragic case of Mike Teevee from Willie Wonkas ‘Chocolate TV’ - where we just take one thing, in this case, a chocolate bar and a young boy and using technology transport it into atoms through the air until it materializes elsewhere? Would it be the same but different...?

But LG White is certainly not as passive. She does not resort to simple trickery, the use of smoke, dust and scientific hocus pocus. No. Because each time she needs to take this one step further. LG White takes images of images, as ‘subject’ and makes them dance for us, re-attaching them to the all inherent art, historical processes. There is now no doubt these are to be seen as works of art, because in essence they contain and are presented as such. But there is still a strong notion of the Duchampien ‘Anxious object’, as these are truly meta-images made ‘of ’ and ‘from’ their time.

We, in a digital world, are formatted to look at our history through digital eyes. We see the ‘all connected’, the ‘all open paths’ and often choose sensual occlusion as the easy option. Images are everywhere and wonderment or a primitive magic is gone. LG constructs deeply into this art shamanism and we, as children, rest in front of her work asking essential questions. Are these photos really what they seem or maybe other things? The label below the piece says ‘Pencil drawing on paper’ and we equate this to us, as a former self, as children, pencils in hand, drawing a cat or mother or tree. Simultaneously, we attach it to other drawings we have seen. We like and understand the importance of art and see that, in its fine execution, the work before us is captivating. Before long, we ask more questions about reality, about images and ultimately about subject.

The forced accidental doubling of the image and its painstaking reproduction, using the oldest and simplest of media, in a perfect and binary world, just could be the one of greatest statements about the real poetic certainty of doubts, the perforated and preformed binary view of humans today. We live in an age of meta-imagery where all seems connected and we are more than ever at the centre of the world. The internet, with Google, Twitter and Facebook, Wiki-leaks and media repositories, peer to peer, robotics, cybernetics, new age, fusionism, global repression, 24 hour news and unbridled sources of information, enables a person, if he or she so wishes, to cross and re-cross the planet each day. We talk to people in Peru, Russia, Africa, Luton, finding their large lines or sensory experience to be close to our own, so we bond and feel less alone.

How frustrated and impotent have we then become, when sex is limited to the cyber. Hyperlinks take us from subject to subject which we rarely, in depth, explore. If an artist is to be eternally of his or her age, then surely it is for this artist, the one of today, to form for us new synthetic morals and résumés. Of all this ‘too much’ of information, LG White, with panache, creates apt synthetics, as through her past, she meets the future and jumps, like a well meaning friend, onto our paths to greet us. Further ideas of global villages, destruction, hope, new tribes, the zeitgeist or flux, all is taken as subject and placed in a logical sense for us - the leaps of imagination, the word games from Wittgenstein, the Freudian layers of automatic connections, LG White gifts them in an eternally festive season and we are left to draw our own lines, as we encounter each of them on our way. As a car flies through the sky and it enters, as if by some magic realism, the world of the 17th century, a new place is born, one where ecological domes grow from the earth like logical mushrooms, hunters are caught in technological traps. But they are just lines placed in space and it is, in the end, we who gaze on in dreamy silence...

It is we who gaze on in dreamy silence...

 

A personal presentation of the work of LG White by Anthony Cook UK

 

 

Review by WATERSCHOENEN EEN KUNSTBLOG DOOR 'ART SPOTTER'

at http://www.jandhaese.be/

 

LG WHITE met 'Those were the days' bij Galerie Jan Dhaese in Gent

 

 

Het is dezer dagen een beetje beangstigend binnenkomen bij Galerie Jan Dhaese. Je komt er meteen terecht in een kabinet met doodshoofden. Dit lijkt wel het verlengde van de beeldencaroussel die Hans Op de Beeck bij 'Sleeping Beauties' in het kasteel van Gaasbeek op ons losliet.

 

Maar ach, wij kinderen van de beeldmaatschappij zijn niet meer zo snel van ons stuk te brengen. Dus drijven we onze kijkervaring meteen door en worden in tweede instantie vooral getroffen door de presentatie van de werken. Een groot aantal zijn gewoon tegen de muur geplakt met een soort beige schildertape, die dan ook nog eens als deel van het werk beschreven werd met zinnen uit liedjesteksten of andere literaire verwijzingen.

 

Bovendien zien we een onderwerp in een tekening en niet het ding zelf (Ceci n'est pas un crâne). En er is meer dan deze en latere doodshoofden. Ook andere, eveneens minutieus uitgewerkte onderwerpen komen aan bod.

In onze digitale kijkervaring hebben we het fotografische beeld allang als 'waarheid' geadopteerd. Wanneer we hier voor de beelden van LG WHITE staat, denken we dan ook onwillekeurig in die richting. Nochtans werkt ze in hoofdzaak met potlood, inkt,... aan geperfectioneerde tekeningen.

Tussendoor toont ze ook simpele notities of verwijzingen, zoals op dat blaadje met de foto van Virginia Woolf: 'If the mind is a machine, then the self is its ghost. It is what cannot be seen.'

Een andere keer is het een kunsthistorische verwijzing naar de dood van een artistiek icoon via een portret van Francis Bacon met de vermelding: 'That's all Folks!'. (De kunstwereld als steeds weerkerende animatiefilm... Those were the days...)

 

Even later wordt een link gelegd met het architectonische oeuvre van Le Corbusier, een toch wel heel overtuigde voorstander van overzichtelijkheid en ordening, terwijl wat verder een stuk tekst van Bob Dylan op de galeriemuur geschreven staat: 'I accept chaos, I'm not sure wether it accepts me!'

Vlakbij hangen dan weer tot in de perfectie uitgewerkte tekeningen, die doen denken aan een 3D-presentatie van denappels of kerstboompjes en die een soort Escheriaanse illusie oproepen.

 

LG White wandelt over en weer tussen verleden en heden, ze verscheurt en ordent, creëert dromen en nachtmerries, pendelt tussen een reële en een synthetische werkelijkheid. Haar beeldgebruik lijkt een schoolvoorbeeld van hyperlinks, een beweging van muisklik naar muisklik via een parcours van toeëigening, waarbij de gerecupereerde beelden uiteindelijk in geïsoleerde of gemultipliceerde, meerlagige weergave opnieuw aan het beeldenarsenaal toegevoegd worden.

 

'Those were the days' laat me achter met de gedachte dat niets is wat het lijkt, terwijl er hoe dan ook maar één weg mogelijk is: vooruit ! En dat terwijl het er naar uitziet dat we hoe langer hoe meer in een virtuele wereld fungeren. Daar, maar ook in het echte leven, geldt de regel: 'More lies ahead'. De interpretatie hiervan laten we graag aan U over.

 

 

L.G. WHITE

'THOSE WERE THE DAYS'

bij Galerie Jan Dhaese

Ajuinlei 15 B