AIC: Bluhm Family Terrace..[Restless Rainbow - by Pae White]

Note: The oculous is off-center....

Restless Rainbow..
by Pae White
Inkjet Print and Vinyl
Location Art Institute of Chicago: Bluhm Family Terrace..
While planning for the installation, the artist wondered: what would happen if the rainbow fell from the sky? What if the rainbow defied expectations and it's color spectrum took a new order? Would it include black as rainbows in comic books often do..

Restless Rainbow - by Pae White..
The diverse work of Pae White engages art, architecture and design to heighten the experience of site and context. Growing up in the "modernist mecca" of Southern California in the late 1960's and 1970's, White developed a visual vocabulary drawn from a variety of influences that range from consumer culture to "high" art - Eames furniture, Vera Neumann scarves and Milton Glaser graphics, among them.

Restless Rainbow, a commissioned, site-specific work for the AIC's Bluhm Falimy Terrace, uses the dramatic space not as a platform for objects but as the work itself. In this piece White drew onm her interest in and knowledge of graphis design, textile and animation to wrap the terrace in a vibrantly colored, energetic abstract rainbow. While planning for the installation, the artist wondered: what would happen if the rainbow fell from the sky? What if the rainbow defied expectations and it's color spectrum took a new order? Would it include black as rainbows in comic books often do..

From the surface of the floor to the top of the glass walls, Whate's work turns the Bluhm Family Terrace into a completely activated site in and of itself. Restless Rainbow inverts the traditional act of "looking out" from the terrace - at the Chicago skyline, Millennium Park and the lakefront - and instead invites visitors to look through the clear, circular aperture and upward to the sky.

Above all, the artist invites viewers enjoying the terrace as a fully immersed enviornment. White said, "I'm not interested in blurring of boundaries, it's really more that there is an art opportunity in all things. In many ways it is about finding these hidden zones." The Bluhm Family Terrace is, in a way, just such a "hidden xone". Though highly visible, the terrace is often recognized more for what it affords than it's own spatial dynamics. Restless Rainbow changes that equation bringing the space to life through a riotous play of color, line and texture..