Andrea Longacre White

What Is My Work About? Artist StatementI think that there isn’t a clean seamlessness to our daily interactions with technology but instead an often awkward, at times clumsy, and occasionally poetic, back and forth. These are the spaces and ruptures my work tries to mine. Our real world interactions with technology don’t adhere to the idealized space of apple ads. The world comes in, our handprint comes in. I’d like to explain how this plays out in these series.Pad Scan:
I realized that if I scanned an iPad with my flatbed scanner, the light from the scanner would confuse the iPad and make it think it was being touched. The iPad’s screen would then start to turn or roll over to another web page. In this way the scans are of digital or web in between spaces which would not be visible otherwise. The iPad moved between pictures of the gallery I had taken before hand and emailed to myself and install shots from past shows visible through the gallery’s website.

Picture of Pad Scan:
Trying to rotate large images in photoshop while my hard drive was full I came across a kind of digital ‘thinking’ where the program stopped or stuttered halfway through its function, struggling to display it’s action.

Blackout:
I typically shoot very quickly and with flash. Importing from my camera there are always a large number of almost all black files where I failed to wait for the flash to recycle power where it had not gone off. Because the content wasn’t illuminated they became about surface. I printed them out as almost all black monochromes and let studio life run its course. They were moved around, stepped on and just generally roughed up. They went from these flat black prints to strange mangled 3-D objects. I then took them to the framer to try to re-tame them back into 2-D photographs which was impossible.

Picture of Blackout:
When I showed the first Blackouts in a gallery I photographed sections of them hanging on the wall. I also photograph the Blackout prints before they are mounted treating them as a kind of ephemera. These two types of new pictures were then put through the same original process of being printed out and left around the studio. This Picture of Blackout has been reshot, reprinted, dealt with physically, redigitzed, reshot off the computer screen over and over and over. Each time the work loses integrity or detail while picking up digital artifacting, color misregistration, etc. The UUUUUs in the upper left hand corner are the digital imprint from an art blog (www.kuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunst.tumblr.com) that posted an ‘original’ version of the image which I then shot off of the computer screen, folding evidence of its online travel into the work.

Analog Escape:
Amidst a constant engagement with technology and machines and screens and digital landscape I feel a desire, at times, to escape. This piece was positing an exit that could never actually function — the rope of knotted pillowcases dead ended into the gallery’s ceiling. A kind of cartoonish childhood memory made as a retronymic alternative to our contemporary culture’s fantasy of escape into the technological space.

Pictures of Blackout Tiled:
This installation was meant to mimic the tiling forward of many files open in photoshop. It also took to an extreme my earlier interest in how images and information move through the world, showing a progression of reshooting and reuse between the physical and digital world.

Ceiling:
This piece was made specifically for a show centered around themes of fiction and deception. There is a silvery material called Alumifoil which lines the ceilings of many industrial spaces (and studios) in Los Angeles. From below the material looks like thin sheets of metal so is itself a kind of fake. Making scans and photographs (and rephotographs) of this material was an effort, in essence, to make a fake of a fake, moving it from the ceiling to the wall to call attention to the material and my re-imaging of it as a double falsehood. The material is stapled roughly to the ceiling which I mimicked by stapling the prints and alumifoil itself to the wall.

Dark Current:
This series began when I was at home driving my father to and from hospital visits and chemo treatments during his last few months of life. I began to obsessively picture crashing the car and failing to help in the only way I could. I searched google images for skid marks and broken windshields (the aftermath of impact) and printed out low res jpegs from stock images and personal blogs. These final abstractions come from generations of shooting low res tiny print outs, collaging them in front of the lens, trying to gain a distance from their painful origins.