The rolling hills and mountains of Southern California, the biosphere, the range of climates from desert to snow covered peaks roamed by mountain goats in one cable car ride the soaring mountains over the sea, the vertigo of a place prone to earthquakes, fire, floods, mudslides, a virtual sim city in real time, life on a movie set in a movie setting. That which inspired David Hockney, the golden sunshine, the movement of topographical features like hyper-suggestive outlines in a Howard Hodgkin painting, this is where the East Village painter and experimental filmmaker Lili White found herself witness to the landscape and its human encroachments upon violently transforming during the wildfires of 2025.
This is hot color, this is hot hot hotness, with the outlines of images like waves spreading over other pictorial terrains – fire in a sizzling blaze along the seams of our imagination.
Working in pastels, White captures the oozing neon of this place in time, birds and cars move around and through blazes, oil derricks, bridges, flaming flamingo cartoons, in a whole range of wildly divergent colors.
Here White is like a canary in a coal mine, a canary in a gold mine, in the land of untold riches, ablaze in a vehicular grand slalom coursing through lighting both artificial and natural under circumstances unexpected and previously unknown, which bespeaks the world of Ginza lights in Gaspar Noe’s “Enter the Void”, an endgame for we are just within a hair’s breath of an apocalypse.
