Johnny Cubert White is a creative of many mediums, more than a few alter egos, and an uncommonly sensitive and instinctive artist who street photography practice was interrupted by his camera losing a battle with gravity... - shana nys dambrot - LA WEEKLY Art is a step from what is obvious toward what is concealed.
--Khalil Gibran
With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcr
aft.
--Henri Matisse
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
--Oscar Wilde
Kintsugi is a tradition in Japanese ceramics of mending cracks with gold, literally transforming breakage scars into gleaming veins of magic. This poetic spirit of not only accepting but embracing and elevating accidental damage into opportunities for transcendent and poignant expression is the same that motivated photographer Johnny White to keep capturing images long after his beloved Canon G9 lost its battle with gravity in spectacular manner. The fall scrambled the machine’s digital innards, resulting in unpredictable, color-bending, refractively lit and richly shadowed, motion-sensitive, prismatic effects. Where another kind of artist might have seen this as a loss, Johnny White saw the birth of what became his most powerful work to date.
is an ongoing project using the post-incident technology to capture images of the people, places, events, and moments that are enhanced by motion blur, distortions, solarizations, interferences, hauntings, and halos. The overall series has so many iterations that it’s getting organized into subseries around themes such as architecture, street scenes, and character studies of the eccentric fashionistas, actors, artists, writers, and bon vivants who populate White's world. The first iteration of has been the SELFiePORTRAIT show, in which White turns the lens on himself, and his personal flamboyance rises to meet that of the intuitive machine, his puckish collaborator in these freeze-frame spectacles. With the broken camera’s help, White shows off his charisma as a master of disguise, exploring his own fictional roles, making every image a micro-story with the psychological depth and promise of a film still. By turns Baroque, disco, retro, classical, and couture, like some kind of Apocalypse Now Liberace playing sequined seance parlor games, in neon yellow eyeglasses and a pageant of glorious moustaches, his iconic platinum mane catching the backlight like fiber optic threads. On the occasion of the recent Hive Gallery exhibition “Naked vs. Nude” White created a portfolio culled from the archives, in which he applies the flamboyance and optically seductive mysteries of the process to the realm of the erotic. With a nod to more explicit material found in both indie porn and art history, White presents a flirtatious series of intimate, lively nude portraits and figure studies that wittily toes the line between nudity and voyeurism. Veiled and transactional, with a heightened awareness of their own appeal, the characters that join him in these cheeky tableaux cavort like Salome -- but in this case the lens is the real coquette. The effects of halo glows, saturated color streaks, sinuous shadows and surreal visual contortions that are part of this overall project lend these images a painterly playfulness that is both sexy and abstract, transforming the unclothed bodies from the passive subjects into the active sites of art-making. Ironically or psychically perhaps, White’s Marian Seldes as Bertha of Ondine has become one of his most popular and acclaimed images, featured in Pershing Square and numerous exhibitions. Showing layered shop-window and street reflections captured in camera, this was the last image he made before he dropped his rig -- and it is in part a portrait of his great friend and mentor, shortly before her death. Maybe she was blessing him by knocking the thing out of his hand -- because that turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to his vision.
--Shana Nys Dambrot
