Cate White

Rubble Works 
Opening reception May 2nd First Friday, 5-8pm

Works on Paper and Ceramic Sculpture

These paintings are part of my side practice of making stream of consciousness works on paper—a separate but generative process that informs my larger, mostly planned, narrative paintings on canvas. This is where I discover techniques, themes, symbols and moods and keep the channel to my unconscious open. Perhaps because they come so directly from the unconscious, these works always seem to tap into some undercurrent of the collective psyche. I’m aware of qualities of horror, abjectness, absurdity, banality, grief and confusion. Along with a strange exhilaration that hints at some kind of latent potential.

In my increasing exhaustion with creating competent forms, I stumbled into this satirical anti-empire aesthetic—one that evokes rubble, broken symmetry, fractured structures, emoji affects and that ironically highlights unworthy-of-notice consumer culture detritus. Maybe this is what surfaces when the illusion of control disintegrates and chaos is laid bare and bedazzled. I don’t know why I should feel hopeful, but I do.

The clay heads are my first foray into ceramics and suggest to me the hungry howl of patriarchal despair.