Lindsey White: New and Recent Signs! @ Casemore Gallery

Editor’s Pick

“It’s really a sign that you ought to go to Lindsey White’s New & Recent Signs! before it closes this weekend. I’m sorry. My excruciating dad joke aside, White is an exquisitely deadpan California conceptualist who fingers the seam between language, objects, jokes, and authority, often, and lately especially, using hand-painted and fabricated signs. A little bossy, a little tender, a little picket-sign-ish, part diner menu: many of these came out of her free café, Chat & Chew, at her Last Art School show at Hunter College in NYC. All of it is an exuberant reflection on how folks gather, organize, resist, and try to make and hold meaning together. A refreshingly human act in our chatrobotic times.”

— Andrew Berardini

About the Exhibition

Lindsey White incorporates signs and signage across the arc of a practice that includes photography, video, sculpture, installation, and more. New and Recent Signs! is a collection of signs she painted, printed, or otherwise produced just in the last year as critical components of exhibitions and gatherings.

Her signs emphasize structures of connectivity and the power of community. They also consider how communities can collaborate, resist, and take action in unstable political and economic moments. The majority of signs featured in this exhibition were integral elements of her functioning Chat & Chew cafe, the backdrop of her Artist in Residence appointment and related exhibition, Last Art School, at Hunter College in New York last fall.

Chat & Chew was a gathering space modeled after a cozy local restaurant with free daily coffee and a homemade lunch that White cooked and served once a week. Like all public spaces, it presented a mandate and opportunity for communication.
The exhibition also included archival materials from the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation and Archive, and White designed a fleet of signs to outline her idiosyncratic classification systems, such as, G.O.A.T., Hauntings, and Idealistic Views. Her love of typography and vernacular lettering investigates the construction of meaning and authority with scrutiny, hijinks, and care.