Painting (Chapel Hill Public Library)

July - September 2010. Site-specific installation at the Chapel Hill Public Library. Multi-tiered installations investigate the grammatical and semantic capabilities of objects and the potential for structural abstraction in text. The work exists in the interstitial space between words and wordlessness. Meanings are constructed, voided, reconstructed. Each of the modular elements presented refers back in some way to White's studio practice, in the form of painted surfaces, framed cross-sections from an ongoing text output process (which White calls her Text Continuum) and objects such as glass bottles containing water from the dehumidifier in her studio, jars of local red dirt and notebooks filled with writings about other artists' work. For the exhibition of her work in the Chapel Hill Public Library, White presents a site-specific series of installation clusters, compositions of paintings, framed text and images, in this case repetitions of an MRI scan of the artist's brain and a photograph of the artist Joseph Cornell seated in his garden. White is also pleased to be the first artist to make use of the library's window/atrium space, for which she's produced a transparent hanging banner with text that creates the effect of words superimposed on the landscape. For this piece White incorporates smooth white stones to demarcate the winding linearity of the garden's mason work terracing, creating the impression of a painterly gesture or imprinted signature upon the landscape.