Pae White on the Artistic Process

Artist Pae White offers insight into her artistic process. Commissioned by SJMA, Pae White’s "Noisy Blushes" soars within the Museum’s thirty-foot high atrium and transforms its entrance into an experiential passageway, delivering a sublime experience for visitors. Approximately 14 x 14 x 11 feet and suspended above the viewer,. the sculpture comprises 68 colors and a design that fluctuates with the time of day, the seasons, and as the viewer changes their vantage point. This site-specific work is the most ambitious commission in SJMA’s history.

Pae White:
One of the things that's always interesting to me are this unintentional surprises that happen in an installation like this. For instance, there's a vibration of the mechanics of the building that is causing the piece to tremor, and I think that's really beautiful because you get this kind of reflectivity, they almost feel like butterflies, and that's something we had no idea, we never planned it, but it's this kind of bonus that is always a really great thing to find out. You never really can fully create the piece until you've actually done it.

I think of the first time I was working on this idea, I was thinking of flowers in a forest. I just wanted something to reflect a kind of cacophony of color. I think this is the most colorful piece of this nature that I've ever done. I definitely always wanted to be an artist. I was fortunate over the years to meet artists who were working professionally to kind of get a sense of how that might be. One of the things that was really important to me that I really love about Millard Sheets' work is that he did mosaics, he did bronze sculptures, he did watercolors, he did oil paintings, he did architecture. He's sort of a polymath. And for me it's really important to think of everything as having a possibility to be made as an artwork. So I have done architecture and I have done mosaics, and I have done watercolors, and I don't want to be just a painter or just a sculptor, I want to be many things.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres is interesting to me because he had such an unapologetic way of talking about love. Hollis Frampton talked about time in a way that I'm interested in, but through black and white film. The first mobiles I was doing were out of paper. One of the first pieces I ever did out of paper was called Aviary. It was this idea that maybe an aviary full of birds had just kind of taken flight but was still in its cage. So it was this geometry of chaos, but it was frozen. And then I moved into this kind of optical glass, paper thin double-sided mirror, and then we discovered this stainless steel, and it's very luminous.

It's made up of over 11,000 electro-plated steel elements that have been silkscreened, different colors and different patterns, and we use a coated cable that's custom colored so the red lines of the cable is also part of the artwork in that it might feel like a mist. In the instance of Noisy Blushes, we've used technology to control how the color moves and to see variations, and we know exactly where every piece falls in every strand. We know exactly where every strand goes, we know which length it's going to be. All the colors have been programmed in such a specific way that some areas have more mirror and some areas have more pattern, some areas have more solid, and this allows us to create distinctive color shifts, or I call them blushes. One can see this piece do something different from the upper level as one would from outside. All the different axises, X, Y, and Z, are being accounted for.

The patterns reference Sol LeWitt, an artist that I'm interested in. Each piece is almost like a little painting. Each one is unique, but it also creates a kind of flow. The hexagon shape came from my interest in something that was maybe more molecular. It's very important to me to try to grab something that's elusive so the viewer might never be able to figure out what's being reflected because it's always changing, and I find that very intriguing.

The first time I did one of these pieces where there was reflectivity, and I think of this vanity that my grandmother had when I was a kid that had a mirrored top and I would look in the mirrored top and I just kept thinking that was a better place than where I was. There's something about mirrors and reflectivity that suggests another place. There's kind of all these kind of layers of different situations, I guess, colors, patterns, that group in kind of organic ways, but is completely digitally produced. Art has brought me surprises and it brings ideas that aren't represented in any other way as effectively. If it's something extraordinary or as yet to ever have been seen, it's presenting some kind of magic.









Learn more at https://sjmusart.org/exhibition/pae-w...

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