In Between the Outside-In, 2009; video still; courtesy of New Langton Arts, San Francisco.

Locality is a central theme in Pae White's exhibition In Between the Outside-In, harking back to Robert Smithson's own earthworks of the 1970's, with their intrinsic tenets of place and permanence. During her recent FOR-SITE Foundation residency, at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, White was struck by the historic uses of the landscape as a gathering and food preparation site from about 4000 BCE until the gold rush era in the mid-nineteenth century

As a result, a re-rendered sense of place--or platzgeist1 -- surfaces from In Between the Outside-In, not only in the context of time but also without the confines of space. Platzgeist is a long-forsaken notion in which place can only be perceived at the crosshairs of meaning and representation. As its Latin translation--genio-locci -- further suggests, it is the lingering spirit (genio/geist) of a locality, the memory of a place.

In Between the Outside-In presents a series of conceptual opposites demarcating the perceptual thresholds--or limina2--between space and place. Qualities such as scale, presence, and permanence are parlayed into ephemeral representations in White's renditions of an 800-year-old oak tree and a humble, wild raspberry shrub, both native to the Sierra Nevadas.

The oak tree and the raspberry shrub are both projections of visually rendered 3-D data, collected in-situ with a non-invasive three-dimensional scanner. The digital mass of topographic information was then animated in collaboration with an expert from Pixar. The resulting visual oscillations are viewed opposite each other in the gallery.

In Between the Outside-In, 2009; installation view; courtesy of New Langton Arts, San Francisco.

The large oak animation is projected and reflected inside a kaleidoscope-like structure that situates the viewer within the expansive and continuously morphing innards of the 800-year-old tree. To be 'in' the tree, or of-the-tree itself seemed to be White's proposition. However, I inevitably viewed these contiguous reflections as alluding to what Henry Bergson terms diachronic--or simultaneous--multiplicities. Here, events or moments are refracted, but don't progress. They exist as a 'cloud' of fractions with no discernible sequence, even though they originate from a chronological -- or synchronic--sequential formation: the animation. For Bergson duration in synchronic multiplicities such as White's video installation becomes the essence of memory and re-collection, a linear sequence of events. By refracting this moving image, White brings us into the diachronic cloud of moments, multiplied as non-sequential, simultaneous space, in effect being in the tree, or the spirit of the tree.

In Between the Outside-In, 2009; installation view; courtesy of New Langton Arts, San Francisco.

Opposites are also alluded to from the perspective of process. Adjacent to the animation is a massive array of assorted pottery borrowed from the private collection of Joe Meade, an artist and art collector White met during her residency at FOR-SITE, Collecting is a staple theme throughout White's work, but Meade is not a ceramist, making the find an improbable one. Its significance for White lay in the tactility and hands-on-clay reality from which each ceramic artifact sprung, as well as their actual, physical presence, as a 'collected' whole.

Conversing with Mr. Meade at the opening also revealed the hidden spirit in the vast knowledge terrain those pottery objects covered. There was a story for each and every object. Meade's keen taxonomic approach revealed sub-groups--clouds--defined only by indiscernible knowledge or subjective traits such as potters, provenance, lineages, cracks, glazes, and their origins in what he termed 'studio' production, as opposed to serial or mass production. Without this diffracting, taxonomic knowledge it was difficult to enter their diachronic existence.

The materiality implicit in the pottery contrasts with the ephemeral nature of the rendered animations, which are simply raw abstractions in the form of data representations and cybernetic manipulations. They are mere re-collections of living organisms that are at once intimately known and yet untouchable. Let's call them the 'spirit-form' representations of the original object, the gheist, the gennio. The intangible data we do not see, but assume in its digital representation. Or what we know about the subject, and sense as it is multiplied in its refraction.

In yet another opposition to the animations' cinematic fluidity, and inspired by Meade's collection, White crafted a series of conic-shaped pots by press-molding the clay into the orifices found in five boulders scattered across the Sierra foothills. Known as grinding rocks, they were used for centuries by the Maidu as places to grind acorns for food. This inherently tactile imprinting of the form and surface of the rocks' cavities becomes recorded memory right on the clay's surface, and then solidified in the kiln for static perpetuity.

White's manipulation of time and permanence by looping and reflecting the animations or by fixing form on to clay, reference original locality. Her demarcation of space within the gallery, suggests that there is an intrinsic connection between matter and memory, between sense and place. She suggests that the objects we behold, simultaneously contain us within them, and yet, still exist in some other place outside, without and despite our consciousness.

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1. platzgeist: neologism (1993, Fz. Schnaas) derived from zeitgeist, a term to signify genio-locci, or sense of place.

2. limina (plural): a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another.

In Between the Outside-In, by Pae White, runs at New Langton Arts through July 18, 2009.

Franz Schnaas is an inter-notional artist, writer, and photographer living in SOMA, SF.