The Thousands

In a show at Locksmith Project Space White made keys out of clay. In a body of work entitled Study that was shown in last year’s Primavera she replicated office supplies. There’s a lot going on with the idea of realness in her work, a whole metaphysical kind of a deal.  This show, of forms White has created and composed in painterly tableaux and photographed and rephotographed and reorganised, is a departure from her previous means of engaging with materiality, but still about that at heart. Her practice is still addressing a lot of the same questions: How is a thing a thing? What is a thing for? Is ‘looking like’ the same as ‘being like’? Do you have a headache yet? She addresses these questions far more eloquently than I’ve managed to here, both in her description of the works and in the pieces themselves.

Once upon a time my undergrad-art-history-self totally signed up to do the tute presentation for the Baudrillard week, and then realised that it was not just a funny coincidence that my lecturer had the same name as the dude who translated and edited the book from whence the reading was excerpted. I’m feeling pretty much the same amount of super-excitement about concepts and fear of sounding dumb in front of the ideas, only this is an Emma White thing and only tangentially a Baudrillard thing, which is good news because these pretty, pretty photographs of things that kind of look like lollies are way funner than that oft-misunderstood Frenchman.