Pae White. Demimondaine

kaufmann repetto is pleased to present Demimondaine, Pae White’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. 

The exhibition title lends itself to the French “demi-monde” or “half-world”, a popular phrase at the turn of the early twentieth century characterizing those living opulent, pleasure-driven lifestyles. The derivative “demimondaine” spoke of the women that lived on the fringe of respectable society, straddling the standards of the “real-world”. Their way of life a challenge of the status quo but existing within the confines of those very ideals - a controlled excess, a chaos within boundaries. 

Pae White’s work utilizes both the most advanced technology and skilled artisans to emphasize the simultaneous limitations and intricacies of each and to contort the connotations of the functional versus the decorative. White’s monumental new, digitally woven tapestries are the scale of backdrops, suggesting the stage-like quality of our own existence. The reflectivity of the quicksilver-like threads mirrors and objectifies our viewership, magnifying and distorting our presence amidst the cacophony of images and information. The commotion of the woven plants and bugs provide non-hierarchical noise; allowing a space for reverie and contemplation. The artworks on view were created utilizing software programming that randomizes distribution patterns and offers the potential for millions of outcomes. Each of the patterned plants represented in the backdrop tapestries posses psychotropic properties, imagined to be the future of healing and calming the chaos of one’s internal world. 
The use of mirrors as an allusion of an alternate, and perhaps, better place is also demonstrated within Pae White’s suspended mobiles. The individual facets mirror the space in shifting perspectives, suggesting that the present could actually be in another place and of another time. 

Pae White’s sculptural still-life works pull their forms from a library of digitally-dimensional clip-art meant to exist in the virtual worlds of video games and animations. These forms are not intended to be brought into our world or rendered in a three-dimensional way. Unlike the fantastical temptation of their flattened counterparts, the realized objects appear flawed, withered, and uncomfortable - their integral color feeling “far away”. 

Pae White’s interest in the discrepancies and individuality of masterful yet hand-wrought production is demonstrated by the four marble popcorn sculptures on view within the gallery. Four craftsmen each studied the organic abstractions and translated their interpretations in marble. The perishable and insignificant kernels are thereby memorialized through the traditional and monumental material. While popcorn is popularly interpreted as a playful or optimistic vessel of leisure, the physical “pops” or explosions offer a more intense and ominous reading. These diverging ideologies and interpretations become illustrative of competing societal and individual cultural extremes. 

Pae White was born in 1963 in Pasadena, California, she lives and works in Los Angeles. She explores a variety of media and materials and proposes a playful dialogue between the art object and the functional one. Through her works, art enters in domestic and everyday spaces. Selected solo exhibitions include Command-Shift-4, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2015); ORLLEGRO, MAK – Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst / Gegenwartskunst, Wien (2013); In Love With Tomorrow, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Düsseldorf (2013); Too Much Night, Again, South London Gallery, London (2013) and Material Mutters, The Power Plant, Toronto (2011)). 
Pae White’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions in venues such as Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2016); PAC-Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milano (2015); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2013); Museé d’Art Moderne, Paris (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); the Prague Triennale (2008); Tate Modern, London, the Jewish Museum, New York, la Triennale di Milano (2006) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Forthcoming solo exhibitions of her work are scheduled at Saarland Museum, Saarbrucken, Germany (2017) and Fondazione Cini, Venice (2017).   

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