Pae White (born 1963, Pasadena, California) celebrates the mundane, the overlooked, and the ephemeral. In an expansive practice that transcends nearly all traditional boundaries—between art, craft, and design—White maintains a critical yet playful eye on popular culture and high modernist ideals. Transforming humble materials into exhilarating experiences that defy logic yet remain oddly familiar, her alluring work suggests that things may not be as they may seem. Tapestry masquerades as architecture. Typography becomes an interface for sculpture and installation. Paper clay emerges as a vessel for painting and embroidered textiles. Suspended steel disks coalesce into meditations on movement and time.

Combining elements of traditional craftsmanship with sophisticated technologies and inventive processes, White allows for a high degree of improvisation in her work. She upends prescriptive museum display practices, opening space for spontaneity and the imagination. In doing so, White reminds us of the undying pleasures that come with close looking and the excitement unleashed by a relentless curiosity about the world.

Beta Space: Pae White is the US premiere of two monumental installations: a 127-foot long digitally-generated jacquard tapestry woven with brilliant cotton, cashmere, and metallic threads, and an assemblage of toys reborn as a massive chess set created by Los Angeles-based artists, and industrial fabricators and artisanal workshops from throughout the world. The exhibition also presents a recent series of delicate cotton and rayon letters and numbers handstitched on paper and in a font of White’s own design.

SJMA’s “Beta Space” series encourages artists to experiment and venture into unfamiliar areas through the production of new work. This exhibition features a dramatic new silk-screened electroplated steel mobile evocative of a flock of birds or a drifting cloud fixed in place; and three abstract paper tapestry paintings from a new body of work by White. Comprised of Japanese paper clay and dyes, the colors that appear in these works emerge from behind in a manner left entirely to temperature, humidity, and chance.

Beta Space: Pae White is organized by Rory Padeken, associate curator.

All works by Pae White.