“Bored” animation still from OMG BFF LOL by Charlie White
Artist Charlie White is invested in the project of American adolescence. Fascinated by the commodification of desire and how this mechanism operates under capitalism, White’s art practice focuses on the teen girl. To White, she is the most powerful bodily form to be employed in the American pop culture imagination, both the locus of reproduction and the focus of misogynistic violence toward women and girls. She could be an embodiment of recycled lust in adherence with hierarchical white, patriarchal standards of beauty. The teen girl is constantly regenerative, yet once she sheds her adolescence, she will never exist as the same commoditized image that White captures in his photographic projects.
White, 42, has been showing internationally since his early 20s. Based in Los Angeles since 1996, he’s been teaching at the graduate level for more than 10 years, and was the director of the University of Southern California’s MFA program from 2007-2011. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design. White grew up in Philadelphia and New York City, where his father still lives. He completed his BFA at the School of the Visual Arts in New York, and then traveled to Los Angeles to do an MFA at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. A big, burly, bearded man, White is never short on words or stories, naturally gathering a crowd round him whether he’s sharing a two-person table at the Viet Noodle Bar in Atwater Village or chasing his two-and-a-half year old around Cafe de Leche in Highland Park, where he lives with his wife, the poet Stephanie Ford. White is high energy, and at any moment he may be either spouting off art critical theory, pontificating on “what is Los Angeles,” or making astute, highly visual observations about the world around him. He is magnetic. He’s also got a broader vision of Los Angeles that comes from being a fixture here.
Read the full article on KCET Artbound Los Angeles: http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/charlie-white-sogtfo-francois-ghebaly-gallery.html
