Pae White

Slow Smoke (2022)

No matter how hard you try, you can’t catch smoke. Like the fastest receiver darting down the field, eluding every tackle, smoke slips right through your fingers.

In Pae White’s monumental weaving Slow Smoke, fleeting white wisps zigzag and drift over a black background. Hundreds of slight variations of colors are woven between the black and white, creating an image that is both abstract and hyper-realistic. By fixing something temporary like smoke into the permanence of an artwork, the artist asks us to focus on the ordinary and see it as extraordinary. White’s tapestry is a kind of alchemy: changing something small and easily overlooked into an intricate study of ephemeral beauty and grandeur.

Pae White is best known for her artworks that use age-old art and craft traditions to transform ordinary objects and ephemeral materials. For over twenty years, White has worked with a digital loom in Belgium to create her monumental tapestries that often appear as if they were painted. While the process is entirely digital and implemented on an industrial scale, the resulting works are imbued with a hand-made quality through White’s careful rendering and color selections.