One such message, on Bored (2020), reads "I don't even go here," a reference to a line in the Tina Fey-directed film Mean Girls (2004) about high school cliques, which later inspired an internet meme. Interpreted differently, White's use of the phrase "I don't even go here" represents a playful anthropomorphizing of the painting itself, where one cluster of marks appears to self-consciously doubt its own place within the larger composition. Do standardized symbols of rainbows, hearts, and clouds "belong" in sophisticated formal compositions? Why should they belong any less than a splotch of paint or an abstract brushstroke, elements which, arguably, have become equally clichéd by their overuse? "There are no new marks," White says, "only new combinations." By recontextualizing marks and symbols associated with American youth culture, White encourages us to consider the emotional and psychological drives that such marks and symbols satisfy: the drive to affirm one's existence, to declare one's love, to be remembered, and to belong.

Although memories of adolescence may be our entry point into these works, the drives to belong and to be remembered are not the exclusive property of adolescence. They transcend age, just as they transcend time, place, and culture. The palm trees in White's Three Palms (Tami + Gina) (2020), for instance, are copied from petroglyphs that Native Hawaiian migrants to Salt Lake City, Utah, painted on the side of Salt Mountain over one-hundred years ago. Although the nearby town they built became a ghost town after they returned to Hawaii a generation later, the images of tropical palm trees that they painted on the snowy rocks survive to this day as a record of an unfulfilled desire to belong. White uses other Hawaiian petroglyph symbols, as well, including the Rainbow Man, who in his original context represents the bridge between Heaven and Earth. By juxtaposing the Rainbow Man symbol with other symbolic representations of rainbows, such as those seen in rainbow-shaped stickers and rainbow-colored suspenders, the artist encourages us to reflect on the multiplicity of meanings that rainbows and other natural phenomena inspire. The motifs White explores—hearts, clouds, rainbows, and trees—are all derived from nature yet filtered through language and culture. By imagining these elements carved onto the same school desk or painted onto the same mountain rock, we can experience them as a chorus of voices, which, despite all their apparent cacophony, represent a common desire to be heard, understood, loved, and remembered. Wendy White has recently exhibited at New Release in New York City (2020), the Philara Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany (2020), Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles (2019), and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2019). She is the recipient of a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2012) and a George Segal Painting Grant (2008). Her work has been featured at leading art fairs, including UNTITLED, Miami, and The Armory Show, New York. Museum exhibitions include Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (Japan), The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu (Japan), and Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin (Germany). She has had solo exhibitions at Leo Koenig., New York City; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Maruani Mercier, Brussels (Belgium); Van Horn, Düsseldorf (Germany), Andrew Rafacz, Chicago; Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris (France); Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo (Japan); and Galeria Moriarty, Madrid (Spain). Her work has been favorably reviewed in The New York Times, New American Paintings, Artforum, Art in America, Forbes, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Blouin Artinfo, Artsy, Artnet, Huffington Post, and Modern Painters, and she was featured in Phaidon’s anthology Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting (2011). She lives and works in New York City, NY.

Logan R. Beitmen.