Charlie White (artist)
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Charlie White (born 1972, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Los Angeles-based artist Charlie White received his BFA in 1994 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, in 1998. He is director of the Intermedia program and a member of the Graduate Core faculty at the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
White’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums such as The Center of Contemporary Art of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain; ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, China; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; Oberösterreichisches Landesumuseum, Linz, Austria; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York. He is represented by Brändström & Stene, Stockholm, Sweden; f a projects, London, UK and Wohnmaschine, Berlin, Germany. His latest monograph, tilted "Monsters" will be published by powerHouse Books, New York in Spring of 2007.
Using a combination of fiction, artifice, and make-believe to represent the human condition, many of White's photographs explore America’s social fictions and the tensions in identity and perception they generate. White shares a relationship with the directorial forms of photography practised by such artists as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall. Applying cinematic techniques, his set-up photographs are directed and staged narrative stills. This narrative focus can be perceived in his previous photographic series like In a Matter of Days (1999) or Understanding Joshua (2001) which employ a pictorial play between reality and fiction, occasionally taken to grotesque extremes.
In White's most recent series, Everything is American (2006), he reconstructs and re-creates historical instances of collective trauma and national anguish, such as the Manson Family murders in 1969 and the 1978 Jonestown massacre. White orchestrates a universe of cultural signifiers and iconic moments to construct a revised history of human violence, while at the same time creating an externalization of a nation’s worst fears for its self-image. Whatever their own innate brutality, the subjects represented in Everything is American are also shown to be victims, though none of White's images are truly innocent. Even at their most anonymous and lyrical, each subject bears the undercurrent of violence. The leitmotif that links the images is the feeling of loss of innocence and the failures of Utopia and the American dream.
White has also directed the short online film "Pink" for Adidas' ADICOLOR campaign and a music video for American indie band Interpol's 2004 single Evil, from their Antics album.
