Cate White: World Raw @ Transmission Gallery

World Raw consists of selected paintings and sculptures from the last twelve years.

These works inhabit a world where personal memory, dreams, political reality, religion, banal culture, and archetypal myth have not yet been separately categorized. Images translate from one story into another, remixing contexts until they lose their fixed meanings. Armageddon arrives as a vaguely sinister faceless shmoo. The devil wears flip-flops with socks instead of cloven hooves. Horror and hilarity trade masks. The miraculous and the absurd share the same language. The sacred, psychological, traumatic, mythic, domestic, and comic all stand on equal groundless ground. 

Over the years, the work has delivered images of confinement and escape: caves, cells, thresholds, thrashing, illuminated openings. But the way to liberation is never clear, and running beneath the work is an undercurrent of grief—for failed transformations, lost certainties, and the perpetual distance between desire and fulfillment. The sacred and ridiculous are merged. Enlightenment appears as a spray-painted glow.

The process of painting is a tightrope act between intention and accident, structure and impulse. Both order and chaos can become prisons. I am searching for a third place: moments of bewilderment, play, revelation, or recognition. Rather than offering a coherent narrative, these works invoke a raw world, unfinished and alive, where meaning is in the making.