Eric White
“Local Programming”
New York, 54 White Street
White’s paintings explore the intersection of the romanticized American dream and the psychological paranoia imbued in this fantasy. Referencing 20th-century film and pop culture with a painterly finesse, his work subverts and recodes the dominant narratives of contemporary society. The exhibition presents a series of vignettes centering around a female character (‘The Woman’) who seeks solace and spiritual enlightenment in television, convinced she is receiving divine transmissions from its programs and the TV Guide. Following a semi-linear narrative, Local Programming documents The Woman’s journey from the suburban living room into the woods, where she uses the TV Guides as sacrament in an attempt to ground herself and connect the rhizome of her beliefs with the rhythms of the natural world.
The Woman works to divine meaning from the TV Guide’s images and programming schedules, and she discerns sacredness in the symmetry of the game show boards found in ‘The Hollywood Squares’ and ‘The $10,000 Pyramid.’ In her questionable state, the show’s boards are impossibly exaggerated, leading her to believe she is perceiving them in a heightened state of consciousness. Through a ritualistic practice, she obsessively defaces, collages, and reconfigures TV Guide covers in order to escalate their spiritual resonance, transforming them into divine objects. Employing a self-styled symbology, which conflates sacred and finite geometries, specifically the Fano plane, she makes connections with tenuous logic and overwhelms her own psyche.
Beneath the seemingly benign narratives of entertainment programming, White observes the dark tendrils of self-doubt and isolation, misogyny and xenophobia instigated by the media machine. Inspired by the work of philosophers Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, White imagines a moment of epiphany in which the worlds of entertainment and spirituality intersect, unraveling any distinction between autonomy and oppression, technology and divinity.
