Detail View: University Art Galleries (UMassD): Port of Entry

Port of Entry: An Installation by Marguerite White

November 10, 2005 - January 12, 2006

2005 ; 2006

University Art Gallery (UMass Dartmouth Galleries)

Lasse B. Antonsen

PORT OF ENTRY An Installation by MARGUERITE WHITE November 10, 2005 - January 12, 2006 "Imagine this: You've just woken up as your ship has anchored in a strange harbor. You ask: Where am I? (Marseille? Hong Kong? Alexandria? New Bedford?) And what century is this anyway?" Marguerite White holds an undergraduate degree from Rhode Island School of Design, and a graduate degree from University of Texas in Austin. She was artist in residence in Gloucester, MA, earlier this year, and just completed a wall mural, TIME TABLE, on the State Pier of New Bedford as part of a public art program administered by the University Art Gallery and AHA! (Art, History, Architecture) with funding from the City of New Bedford and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Marguerite White was born and grew up in the Greater Boston area. She has lived for extended periods of time in Europe, especially on the canals of Amsterdam and on the Rhein in Cologne. In the US she for a long time kept a home base on the island of Vinalhaven, Maine, while traveling to paint on Coney Island, in New Orleans and Boston, and on Nantucket. She currently lives and maintains a studio and installation space in Newton, MA. Although a painter, Marguerite White has focused much of her energy since 2002 on the creation of installations. In 2004 she created a shadow installation in Chateau La Napoule in Southern France. The mural on the State Pier is placed above a quote from the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa: "God Placed Danger and the Abyss in the Sea, but He Also Made it Heaven's Mirror." It will remain on view while the installation is featured at the University Art Gallery. About the installation, PORT OF ENTRY, Marguerite White has said, "I am at heart a storyteller. This space, these images, are clues to what is happening. Please create your own path through this environment." Marguerite White's love of harbors, boats and the sea, is clearly present in TIME TABLE and PORT OF ENTRY. Like Pessoa, she moves among collective images and factual details, while navigating dreams and danger. By projecting cut-outs, Marguerite White lets us participate in a theatrical performance, where we become shadows among shadows, but where our longings and fears appear more real than ever. Lasse Antonsen, Curator The installation can be considered a project of the New Bedford Cabinet of Natural History, and viewed as a commentary on, and a tribute to, the seafaring individuals and nations, whose sense of adventure, fanaticism, scientific curiosity, greed, and search for the Other in the primitive, and for the culturally superior in the Far East, have defined who we are today.

Installation

http://www1.umassd.edu/cvpa/universityartgallery/past/2005/marguerite_white.cfm

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White, Marguerite

American

1966-present

Marguerite White was born in Boston in 1966 and raised in Newton. In 1988 she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Textile Design. She spent the better part of the next decade working and living on commercial waterfronts in the US and Europe. Working on locations stretching from Nantucket to Vinalhaven ME, Coney Island, Amsterdam, Cologne and New Orleans, she both painted the waterfronts and was a housepainter on the waterfront. In 1999 she fled to the middle of Texas, where there was no waterfront. By 2002 Marguerite earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Texas in Austin, where she had, under the tutelage of a Dominican Shamanista, stopped painting altogether and started drawing on the walls. She currently lives in Newton, and teaches drawing at College of the Holy Cross. She maintains a studio in an former fur vault and continues to draw on the walls.

http://margueritetwhite.com

http://margueritetwhite.com/home.html

Port of Entry

cut paper, roofing felt, overhead projections

installation

2006

a few words about my work... Consider how the feel of a neighborhood can change suddenly and radically by music blasting from a passing car. This incongruity imposed on a known landscape has a jarring effect on one's sense of time and place that leads to unpredictable associations and improbable points of reference. Analogously, I intend for my drawings to have the effect of an unusual story overheard in a public place, one that changes your relationship to a physical place by becoming another layer of its history. Working with chalk and shadow pictographs, an ephemeral form of graffiti, I create a layered narrative within a public space, allowing the viewers to create their own paths through my stories. Many believe the process of making art somehow revolves around creating permanent 'beauty'; but my work is not made to be sacrosanct. I do not create objects to be enshrined in a museum; my work hinges around the beauty of human interaction, the myriad reactions that can be provoked.

http://margueritetwhite.com/home.html

2013

BC