In anticipation of the upcoming Little White Dress Show, we’re considering other implications and applications of the color that is all colors and no color. Here, artist, gallery director (Chambers), writer and host of ArtStar radio, Eva Lake, considers White.
When I read articles about sexy movies, Body Heat (1981) is often mentioned. It was only a few years ago that I finally saw it for the first time. Immediately I related, but not so much because Kathleen Turner was a movie star Goddess on par with just about any of the past. Good God, what a woman!
It was the use of white. She wore one white floating ensemble after another throughout the film. These ensembles were definitely of the era (let’s call it Halston – smooth and reductive) but were completely timeless, almost like the Greeks. And they showed me what I always suspected – that white is far from strictly virginal. White is mysterious, a sort of absence of implication. It lets the imagination wander and in this, you can be vulnerable. The white is what led William Hurt into lust and murder, unsuspecting.
I’ve never had the floating kind but I have had my share of white clothes. The Mod look, first of all, in white leather jackets, white Lee men’s jeans and white boots. Plus those frilly shirts the Who and the Hollies used to wear. I wore a plain white dress to the opening of Chambers.
Agnes Martin
And of course there is white in art. I used it a lot when I first painted at the Art Students League. Right now I am considering going back to it, as I try to figure out this new thing I’d like to address. But the white I consider is a far cry from the meditation of say, an Agnes Martin work.
The thing with white in painting in that it can give you (the viewer) a way out. It can break things up and I’m not so sure I want that. I enjoyed my private association with Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound. That bombardment was very central to my last body of work.
–Eva Lake, originally written in July 2005
www.lovelake.org
The Little White Dress Show takes place on June 8 at 7:30 at Disjecta. Twenty designers. Little white dresses.
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