Interview with Artist Eric White for Portray Magazine
"The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye," declares media prophet Professor Brian O'Blivion in David Cronenberg's 1981 film Videodrome, both a diagnosis and an indictment of American media hyperconsumption. Central to Cronenberg's frame throughout his film is the television set. A screen within a screen, no longer a mere prop or an inanimate object on the periphery of a room for families to gather around, but the central force around which all social life gravitates.
The television screen is also central in Local Programming, a new show from Los Angeles based artist Eric White, opening at New York's GRIMM Gallery. In this series of twelve paintings, an enigmatic narrative unfolds involving an anonymous female figure (The Woman) who searches for and receives messages transmitted by television game shows and TV Guide magazines.
Throughout his career, White has interrogated various forms of mass media and popular culture. Over the last decade, he has integrated the ever-present screen into his work to explore ideas of participation and voyeurism. Envisioned here is a hallucinatory realism, an invented reality rendered with remarkable technical precision that is simultaneously marked by distortions in color, scale, and space. White's paintings intend to keep us off balance in order to collapse any stable distinction between the real and the imagined. As with television, our perception is expanded at the moment it becomes compressed….
Interview with Artist Kour Pour for Portray Magazine
"It is known that names of places change as many times as there are foreign languages; and that every place can be reached from other places, by the most various roads and routes, by those who ride, or drive, or row, or fly." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Reflecting on arrivals and departures, precious cargo and fellow travelers, the view from 10,000 feet up, destiny or destinations is unavoidable when encountering the interdisciplinary practice of U.K.-born, L.A.-based artist Kour Pour. A steady rhythm of airplanes cruise over his Inglewood studio to and from nearby LAX, a perpetual reminder of worlds that exist beyond the shores of Santa Monica.
Working in close proximity to one of the busiest airports on the planet is a fitting setting for an artist whose work explores the liminal spaces where people meet, and exchanges take place. Pour is a painter of contact zones, the bridges, and borderlands that connect and divide intertwined cultural histories. Being born into a family of mixed heritage and then later moving to a new country to pursue art school in Los Angeles has made Pour sensitive to the experience of those he refers to genially as out-of-towners. Migrating was a formative experience for the young artist, and his body of work continues to question categories of the exotic, the foreign, the tourist, and the guest. After 15 years of developing a polyglottal practice in Los Angeles, a city where over 200 languages are spoken, the British-Iranian-American painter is quintessentially Angeleno…