ANDREW RAFACZ

October 12, 2018, 3:56pm

Crushing the Can: Wendy White

Oh!,my good fucking God can you hear it?, that low sounds like harnessed thunder, that rumble of plates and paradigms being pushed, the trembling, the shuddering, heaven-shaking, deity-quaking--because He is hiding—kraken's roar of an engine, an engine of creation through destruction, God's Own 1972 Plymouth Scamp column cracked and with the proper hand finally at the wheel, stepping down, stepping hard with all the driver's got, dropping that pedal like a guillotine and shredding denim and the very fabric of time and space, ripping loud and fast though an amalgamation of the decades of the American man, the formative years when the whole bloody disgusting thing, the thing which we're witnessing the apex and nadir both of now—an extinction boom, the rage-filled cry of something mortally wounded, the eyetooth corner, the coiled snake striking forth from the fly, the death rattle, please let if be the death rattle!—this hypermacho, alpha-male, dick-in-one-hand, beer-and-throat in the other toxic masculinity, and she's crushing that can now;

July 29, 2014, 9:07am

Norman Zammitt at Andrew Rafacz

Originally published on THE SEEN

Norman Zammitt’s acrylic paintings of gradated color, currently on display at Andrew Rafacz, were produced in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, around the same time that home computers began gaining popularity. The works, much smaller in scale but similar in style to Zammitt’s Mural paintings, are composed of narrow bands of precisely calculated solid color on canvas board mounted to float about an inch away from the wall. A range of palettes, perfectly applied to smooth surfaces – Yellow Violet 43Red to Green I – often evoke scenes in nature, such as sandstorms and sunrises, and create glowing window-like spaces in the gallery. Existing as objects of obsession, the paintings reveal Zammitt’s desire for transcendence through labor and technical precision, during a period of a monumental technological shift.


Norman Zammitt | Diagonal I, 1979. acrylic on canvas board. 9 x 12 inches. Diagonal I, 1979. acrylic on canvas board. 9 × 12 inches. Carter and Citizen.

Listed under: Review

October 16, 2013, 8:00am

Rainbow Kick – Wendy White, Pick Up a Knock at Andrew Rafacz

It is an image we all know well when we think of soccer. A player frozen in mid-air, as if swinging on an axis, legs outstretched, climbing above the head as the cleat reaches for the ball, seemingly out of reach and incredibly high and far away, until it makes that miraculous contact of an overhead kick. This image is remembered with the echo of a loud roar; it is the image sportscasters lose their voices to, where the crowd hits fever pitch – utterly spectacular and quintessentially European. But more than this, it is heroic and performative, a show of strength and superiority – it is, in a word, how sports culture codifies “male”. What is the opposite of this image? Wendy White’s (NAP #22, #28) exhibition Pick Up a Knock, currently on view at Andrew Rafacz, delivers the reverse (though not necessarily the antithesis) of the rainbow kick – the international soccer phenomena known as “flopping”. This image is almost equally as ubiquitous, though it champions the idea of failure toward success – the melodramatic falls, and frivolous collapses, all with the hopes of tricking the referee to call a foul. Within this idea of failure towards success – what has the potential to fail more than a young white woman taking on a canonized male subject matter, specifically that of a different race and language? White walks a fine line between representation and metaphor, quietly side stepping the urge to ask too many questions through the form of the exhibition itself. – Stephanie Cristello, Chicago Contributor

Wendy White | El Azteca, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, wood, enamel, 101 x 79 in. Installation view. Photo courtesy of ANDREW RAFACZ.

Listed under: Review

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