“Thru A Lens” by Candacee White
Liggett Studio
through January 29 (gallery hours 5-8pm Thursdays, 1-5pm Saturdays)
You remember it from geometry class: the lens, a 2D shape that emerges at the center of two intersecting circles, a shape like an almond or an eye or a lentil (which is where the word “lens” comes from). In three dimensions, a lens focuses light so intensely that you can start a fire with it. It brings what’s far away closer, makes it possible to see things we couldn’t otherwise see.
In “Thru A Lens,” on view through January 29 at Liggett Studio, Tulsa-based artist Candacee White focuses her inner eye on this humble but ubiquitous shape. She finds it here, there, and everywhere—from organic forms to spiritual iconography to sci-fi fantasies—and refracts her own imagination through its gentle curves. The result is a show that teems with ideas, histories, colors, and mediums—many elements interconnecting through the inspiration of a single form.
“Thru A Lens” suggests that while a lens can be either naturally occurring or human-made, its real identity is something more like an archetype, a symbol that recurs through all of creation, a sort of cosmic signature that we’d do well to meditate on. With her intentional use of methods and mediums, in work that emerged out of an artist residency in Mexico City last year, White gives us many angles through which to do that.
In a series of pieces she calls “environments,” she uses watercolors to soften the clean lines of the lens shape into blobs and corpuscles, gathered in an oozing bloom like what you might see looking at a drop from a tide pool through a microscope. My favorite of these watercolors, hung vertically, evokes an entrance to a cave, or perhaps a kayak, a shield, or the pupil of a cat's eye.
Intricate handmade collages draw from White’s extensive world travels to create environments with a totally different feel, conjuring the speed and noise of civilization—almost a visual anthropology. Scraps of images, colors, and words meet and overlap, murmuring in many tongues through time and space, suggesting unexpected connections and delivering dozens of tiny pleasures as my eye traveled through the profusion.