Insomnia is not just a sleepless night; it is a plague of thoughts: memories, what-ifs, the concept of morality, that poem you read from the bathroom wall- anything is fair game. Pae White, a Los Angeles-based artist with an insomnia issue of her own, took the stream of consciousness that had been tormenting her and poured it into the South London Gallery in the form of purple, black, and red acrylic yarn.
photography by © Andy Keate
Too Much Night, Again is a large scale configuration of thread that is woven from wall to wall; a delicate web of illusion. From the outside, White’s thread installation looks like a massive loom of bruised colors, but as viewers weave themselves farther into the yarn, they find that the string spells out the words TIGER TIME on one wall and is inter-woven across the space of the room to the word UNMATTERING on the opposite wall. It took 48 kilometers of thread and two weeks of meticulous work to install this matrix of string.
photography by © Andy Keate
White’s creation is truly an expressive portrait of 3:00am anxieties. The dimensions which White used to create the structure give the impression of looking at the mind of an insomniac. From the outside, the viewers have no idea what is going on in the inside of the insomniacs mind, it is only made apparent that the insomniac is overwhelmed with thought by the massive amount of yarn in the air that symbolize her stream of consciousness.
Then, the viewers get to move deeper into the subconscious of the yarn to see the actual coherent thoughts running through her head: TIGER TIME and UNMATTERING. At the same time, the viewers are now a part of the exhibit, as blips of thought in the insomniacs mind. This brilliant structure of symbolism and intricacy can be viewed at the South London Gallery until May 12th, 2013 and on its official website: southlondongallery.org.
photography by © Andy Keate
