Cate White

Instagram: @catewhite

Bio: Self-taught beginning at age 30, White’s work became public in 2014 with the ProArts 2x2 Solos Exhibition, followed by the 2015 Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts, the Bay Area Now 8 triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and residencies including a fully-funded, year-long residency in Roswell, New Mexico, a Master Artist residency with Joan Snyder at Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Mills College Art Museum A+P+I residency, and 10 solo shows and multiple group shows in the Bay Area and beyond. While primarily a painter, White often exhibits her work in multi-media installations that include drawings, sculpture, video and books. She now splits her time between Oakland and a shack on the Mendo Coast where she hosts How Do You Paint, an unhinged, comedic and semi-instructional painting show on YouTube.

Statement: My paintings inhabit a world where personal memory, dreams, political reality, religion, banal culture, and archetypal myth have not yet been separately categorized. Images translate from one story into another, remixing contexts until they lose their fixed meanings. Horror and hilarity trade masks. The miraculous and the absurd share the same language. The sacred, psychological, traumatic, mythic, domestic, and comic all stand on equal groundless ground. Over the years, the work has delivered images of confinement and escape: caves, cells, thresholds, thrashing, illuminated openings. But the way to liberation is never clear, and running beneath the work is an undercurrent of grief—for failed transformations, lost certainties, and the perpetual distance between desire and fulfillment. The sacred and ridiculous are merged. Enlightenment appears as a spray-painted glow. The process of painting is a tightrope act between intention and accident, structure and impulse. Both order and chaos can become prisons. I am searching for a third place: moments of bewilderment, play, revelation, or recognition. Rather than offering a coherent narrative, these works invoke a raw world, unfinished and alive, where meaning is in the making.