Cate White

Roll Up Project is pleased to present paintings and sculptures by Cate White. White’s otherworldly environments are based on keen observations of daily life, and often use elements of fantasy, satire, and cultural commentary. Her subjects seem to be in the world, but not necessarily of the world.

Two paintings hang in the Harrison Street window: Nature Man (2024) and Breakthrough Painting (2024). In Nature Man, a mustachioed man with aviator glasses and a ’70s haircut sits in repose with an orange tabby cat on his lap. His body is diaphanous – completely solid in some parts, and transparent in others – and one of his hands is dark brown. While his face belies a culturally specific identity, the rest of his body hints at something else, perhaps an identity that is permeable, or contains multiplicity. The landscape in the background is uninhabited (apart from a few silhouetted pink unicorns), unmarred by culture and its constructs.

Breakthrough Painting (2024) contains irregular colorful shapes breaking through a matte black background. At its center, in white handwriting, is the text “breakthrough painting.” The awkward simplicity of the painting combined with the grandiose text points to a satirical take on self-help culture that offers revelation as a consumer product. As with most of her work, White alludes to spiritual longings while pointing to the ways our individualistic neo-liberal value system has commodified our most noble human aspirations.

Goddess on the Spectrum (2024) fills the windows on Third Street, along with a small mixed media work entitled Raincloud (2024). In the former, a clumsy nude goddess figure expels a multicolored, glittery arc studded with fake flowers. Raincloud depicts a dimensional cloud form unloading a multicolored torrent of rain. It could also be interpreted as an atomic mushroom cloud billowing out above an explosion. White remarked that there is vitality in the shadows of life, and that rather than trying to deny the shadows, we can find catharsis or deeper understanding in making conscious the repressed aspects of the world.

In a moment where politics, war, and the environment are causing turmoil and pain, perhaps this torrent of rainbow energy is just what we need. White’s paintings and sculptures allow viewers to step into another version of reality, based on a familiar world but not faithfully replicating it, where there is freedom to engage with multiple facets of experience, with little risk to anything other than our established ways of thinking.

About the Artist

Cate White plays with identity and culturally-charged imagery to present new ways of understanding contemporary life. While primarily a painter, White often exhibits her work in multi-media installations that include drawings, sculpture, video and books.

White is the recipient of the 2015 Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at George Adams Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ProArts, Guerrero Gallery, Sonoma State University Art Gallery, and Mills College Art Museum, among others.

White splits her time between Oakland and a shack on the Mendocino Coast where she hosts How Do You Paint, an unhinged, Bob Ross-inspired painting show on YouTube.

See more artwork at catewhite.com or on Instagram at @catewhite