Lindsey White
Matter of Fact

Lindsey White at Eli Ridgway Gallery

San Francisco Chronicle

January 18, 2013
by Kenneth Baker

The smirking ghost of Marcel Duchamp hovers benignly over San Franciscan Lindsey White's show at Ridgway. No artist can use a stool, as White does in "The Comedian's Stool" (2012), without triggering thoughts of Duchamp's famous kitchen stool with bicycle wheel affixed.

Atop White's stool sits a fallen tumbler with a pool of clear resin "water" spilling from it onto the floor. Fictionalizing an awkward stage moment, the piece forms a joke in its own right.

Duchamp, the godfather of Dada, comes up again with White's "12 Cartoon Breaks" (2012), a custom window of black acrylic panes - reminiscent of his "Fresh Widow" (1920) - each pane with a jagged opening cut to match a "break" pattern White found in comics. Her piece will remind viewers of a certain age that early Pop art, for its hijacking of comics imagery, was derided as "Neo-Dada." Perhaps she even intends a reference to the so-called broken window fallacy, concerning the upside of downbeat events, about which economists have been arguing since the mid-19th century.

To make "3-Color Method" (2012), an endless-loop projected video, White got super smashable vases in red, yellow and blue from a Hollywood prop shop. She recorded each vase as it shattered against a wall, then superimposed them digitally to yield an explosive equivalent to color mixing in the traditional printing process.

Less conceptually, the video reads as a violent movie moment bereft of context. In a gallery setting, it garners context from viewers' associations to, say, Expressionist paint slinging and the smashed-crockery pictures that made Julian Schnabel's name.

https://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Lindsey-White-at-Eli-Ridgway-Gallery-4206583.php

Matter of Fact at Eli Ridgway Gallery

KQED
December 20, 2012
by Sarah Hotchkiss

Lindsey White's second solo exhibition at Eli Ridgway Gallery is a study in breaks, spills, and ubiquitous objects. Matter of Fact is a grouping of video, sculpture, and photographic works that cite accidental and purposeful modes of visual comedy, forming engaging loops throughout this exceedingly pleasing installation.

Remarkable for its restraint, Matter of Fact consists of only eight artworks. Each piece is given a refreshing amount of space, allowing viewers to make their own connections between recurring visual themes without feeling bullied into a specific take on the work. One such theme is 'the break,' showing up as a series of cartoonishly broken windows, never-ending shattered glass, and the straightforward illustration of the results of a hammer-on-glass confrontation.

Despite the potential to be so, White's breaks aren't violent. Even the luminous photograph Breaking Glass, the most purposeful of the bunch, appears to be an experiment rather than an act of aggression. Similarly, 3 Color Method, reads like live documentation of a Harold Edgerton photograph, as opposed to video of dishware thrown in a fit of rage. Downstairs, against the back wall of the darkened space, this floor-to-ceiling projection shows a slow motion loop of red, yellow, and blue glass breaking simultaneously into scattering bits. With each crash, the viewer attempts to gather more information from the short clip before the solid objects dissolve, confetti-like, into a multi-color burst.

In a neat inverse of this silent video, a blacked-out room off the larger downstairs gallery hosts Glass Sounds, an image-less audio piece. A ceiling-mounted parabolic speaker plays a stream of noises most accurately described as "a bull in a glass shop," creating a series of satisfying crashes, rumbles, and tinkles as smaller shards hit the ground. With the audio coming from above, the glass shatters right on top of the listener's head, producing involuntary, but thrilling flinches with each unexpected explosion of sound.

The comedy of Glass Sounds comes from the aural overload, or the idea of a place where seemingly endless supplies of glass could be broken. More references to such physical comedy come upstairs, where The Comedian's Stool is a joke and punch line rolled into one sculpture. Clear resin pours out of a sideways glass and turns into a puddle-shaped piece of clear acrylic, preserving a short-lived moment in permanent materials. Downstairs, Spilled Shirt harkens back to the sculpture above, but also conveys a sense of mysterious meaning. Is there a hidden face in the darkened cloth? A mystical message to be gleaned from its presumably accidental appearance?

The looped video Strobes seems the most likely candidate to assist in decoding the various aspects of Matter of Fact. A man's hand extends in from the right side of the screen, holding or modeling an assortment of rainbow-hued household objects. Each still image mimics the burst of a strobe flash, momentarily illuminating a new object before it is replaced by another. With each object offered up in succession, the video resembles a rebus of sorts. But since the combination of a pineapple, comb, tape measure, and tennis ball yields nothing, the gesture becomes more of a magic trick reveal, the objects appearing from darkness in a strange "ta-da!" moment.

https://www.kqed.org/arts/113034/matter_of_fact_at_eli_ridgway_gallery