Eric White. Local Programming

About

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.

White has explored media throughout his career, incorporating screens into his work over the past decade to examine ideas of participation and voyeurism, bringing the viewer into the frame of the painting and reflecting back the gaze of the artist. While Local Programming looks back to a nostalgic heyday of television, when our attention was less divided across multiple screens, the exhibition examines contemporary debates around overconsumption and the impact of media on free thought and democracy.

Responding to and lampooning our collective media obsession and the churn of content perpetually driven toward the consumer, White’s Local Programming challenges what the agenda behind entertainment really is, who the gatekeepers are, and what lies beyond the commercialized façade of the television screen. The Woman finds herself on a spiritual journey, engaging in mystical practices and rituals to seek truth in the pages of the TV Guide. Delusional or awakened, she finds comfort and stability in the mundane, and profundity in pop culture.