In her most recent exhibit Lucy White again sets out on her most frequently attempted mission—to suggest that suburban America lacks creativity. Despite the overwhelming irony of that statement, White has surprisingly created an interesting and clever show.

Accompanying the work in this show is a biography of White that reads, “I grew up in Maine in a house with a lawn and a mother who took care of the house and a father who took care of the lawn. My latest body of works-on-paper are a series of simple and singular images which make up the building blocks of this suburban childhood. I have developed a stencil process to draw these images, arranging Band-Aids … Band-Aids are a familiar American icon, a useful tool from childhood suggesting that products can make life better.”

True to White’s claim, the paintings and titles in this exhibition are simple, but suggest complex implications. The first painting in the show is entitled “Headstone.” This wordless gray mass is shocking at first because of its placement in the show. It immediately sets the morbid tone that White wants—she suggests that life, creativity and energy are dead in the suburbs. The final paintings in this 20-painting exhibit is “Suburb”. The green-on-green arrangement of mini cookie-cutter houses, lined up in perfect rows is eye catching. These paintings—together with works such as “Beer,” “Donut” and “Gun”—clearly portray White’s feelings about suburban America.

While White’s observations of the horrors of suburban America have validity, her work is stronger when she steps away from her crusade. Paintings that have nothing to do with suburban life, such as “Pigeons” and “Nude,” are the show’s strength. “Pigeons,” done in gray tones, is a very simple painting of pigeons searching for food. But the detail of the birds and their arrangement on the paper make it stand out. White depicts only a few full pigeons, showing just the feet and other extremities of the others. Painted in pinkish flesh tones, “Nude” is also simple, showing just the basic figure of a nude woman. But its simplicity and texture gives it an elegance and distinction the other drawings of nudes lack. In this case, as with all of the paintings, the medium is the force that makes the work interesting.

White composed all of the paintings in this show using a layering method of paint and Band-Aids. To create the pieces in this exhibit, she first painted a layer of color and placed differently shaped Band-Aids over the paper. Then she painted over that layer with another color and again placed more Band-Aids in a design on the paper. When she was done applying all of the colors in the piece, she removed the Band-Aids, revealing a multi-colored drawing. Although there are no Band-Aids on any finished drawings, White’s use of Band-Aids is clear in her work—the tiny holes, soft padding and distinctive rounded corners can be identified in almost every painting.

The show itself is imaginative and creative, unlike the idea behind it. The suburbs, like all areas in America, clearly have their faults, but White’s method of illuminating these faults seems counter-productive. She proves, through her work, that suburban America in fact does not stifle creativity. With nothing but paper, paint and a box of Band-Aids, White-—a suburbanite herself—has created fascinating works of art.

Lucy White’s work will be at the Bernard Toale Gallery through April 28.

Lucy White’s bright little paintings, meanwhile, are equally innocent and popularly appealing, though a bit slyer in their conceptual content. While White’s earlier works were constructions that evolved into abstractions or patterns and incorporated romantic additives like lace, seed pods, and leaves, Blue Eyes (1996, plate 67) may be a transitional piece. Its patterned abstraction of felt circles that the artist cut out freehand resembles a sea of gazing, blissful baby blues and feels more cartoony than romantic, a bit reminiscent of Ellen Gallagher’s strategies of tiny object/image flat up against planar surface. White carries both application and paint over and onto the deep, built-up sides of the work, making a textural and three-dimensional object that defies pigeonholing as either painting or sculpture. Cutting her own circles, White explains, “gives them a tiny individuality and animates the overall surface—not in a chaotic way, but in a very active way because there are so many. You see some areas being squeezed and other areas with a bit more breathing space. The sides of the piece are an active part, and comment on the painting’s content or process.”

White’s later works, meanwhile, are simplified linear forms that could have been traced from infant picture books, notwithstanding the occasional nude or revolver, and her colors are laid down in flat, monochrome blocks as if strictly corralled between imaginary lines. Taking the place of felt circles and seedpods are mere imprints of objects, recognizable drugstore sundries like Band-Aids, Handi-Wipes, and sanitary pads.

While the Dadaists may have been the first to subvert consumer culture, White’s use of nontraditional art materials links her with mid-century Pop Art, when Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began adding found objects like coffee cans and stuffed goats to their paintings and sculpture. By definition she may be even more aligned with Arte Povera in her combination of conceptualism, minimalism, and the use of valueless materials. Textiles added to and even substituted for paint and canvas, have been a recent ploy, with examples of knitting, embroidery, quilting, and items of clothing frequently in evidence. These materials, as well as White’s latest use of overtly domestic subject matter, are tributaries of feminism blended with earlier art movements. White’s essentially light-hearted, childlike aesthetic, her latest outright evocation of the kindergarten art table and coloring book images, and her continuation of cheery, popular crafting are all tied to the comfort and coziness of late-twentieth-century suburban childhood and the resulting television-propelled product culture that is discernible in the work of many artists her age.

At her local drugstore, painter Lucy White is getting a reputation.

“I go to the store and buy tons of boxes of Band-Aids, and it’s always the same person at the counter,” White says with a wry smile. “One time, they asked, ” ‘Are you OK?’ “ White explained that she was an artist, buying art supplies.

“Oh, what kind of artist?” asked the clerk. “Landscapes?”

Not exactly. White told the fellow she painted with Band-Aids. She had been purchasing more boxes of sanitary napkins than might seem, well, normal. That’s because she makes prints with them.

The clerk turned toward others in the line. “Next.”

Through April 28, White is showing what she calls her “Band-Aid Paintings” at the Bernard Toale Gallery. She makes them by coating paper with paint, then affixing the bandages in the shape of, say, a bunny, a horse, or a gun. She paints another layer of color, then removes the bandages leaving a picture drawn in the clear, dimpled outlines of the bandages.

“Technically, I don’t use the Band-Aids,” White admits. “I use ones made by 3M. They’re called NexCare.”

Her “Kotex Diary” prints are part of “Domestic Culture,” a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art in Portland.

“I’m actually using Carefree and Lightdays,” she confesses. “They’re great. The paper keeps absorbing and absorbing.”

Suspicious drugstore clerks aside, White, 40, has developed a reputation as a hot young painter. Her bandage painting “Flag,” which is on display at the Toale gallery, graces the cover of the New England edition of this year’s “New American Paintings” survey.

The DeCordova Museum has tapped her as part of next year’s retrospective of 50 years of painting in the region. The Maine Times declares White “arguably one of the most important painters to come out of Maine in the last decade.”

She’s a sprite of a woman, with short, platinum blond hair. She moves around her North End studio nervously, sipping a beer, trying to convey what it is she does, but she is not quite at ease with her words. The studio, on the top floor of an eight-story building, is orderly. But bright, puffy pompoms are strewn across the floor. The artist put them there to distract from the dust when the building held an open studios event.

For each new show, White’s artist statement begins the same way: “I grew up in Maine in a house with a lawn, and a mother who took care of the house and a father who took care of the lawn.”

The place was Brunswick, Maine, overlooking Casco Bay. And suburban American identity is a frequent subject of her work.

White’s last show featured bandage paintings of houses: ranch houses, Colonials, Capes. The basic lines of the bandage drawings convey a 1950s idealism, but the material also speaks of wounds and simplistic solutions to harrowing problems. There’s the suggestion that maybe Beaver Cleaver had a few skeletons in his closet.

“The work is not 100 percent autobiographical,” White states. “It’s like writing fiction. I take some things from my life, but I change things around, too. But people relate. A lot of people see the work, and say, ‘Oh, this was my childhood.’ ”

She titles her works with the brand name most associated with the product she uses — such as Band-Aids and Kotex — because she sees humor and horror in what those products have come to represent in American culture: society’s emphasis on cleanliness and disposability, as seen through the lens of commerce. Whether the customer truly needs Band-Aids is not the point; the market convinces of the need. “There’s something superficial about the product,” White declares. “We never had Band-Aids in the house when I was growing up, and my father was a pediatrician. I think of them as being an all-American product.”

Alongside tamer subjects, the current Toale gallery show offers images of sex and violence. A gun, a beer, a female torso, and a bat, make up one suite of paintings. Lately, White has been churning out Band-Aid drawings, which she makes more quickly than the paintings. In the drawings, she leaves the bandages affixed to the paper. She favors decorative Band-Aids, and has made a gun drawing with brightly colored Barbie Band-Aids.

The artist has come a long way from the work she was doing back in 1993, when the Rose Art Museum showed her Minimalist works, rectangular paintings with natural forms like leaves, pods, and bugs embedded in layers of resin and sectioned off in grid or diamond patterns.

“The older pieces were about sitting, and meditating and being still,” White says.

She glances at the newer works, with their bright colors and pop images, with their Band-Aids and Kotex and Hand-Wipes, and smiles. “I guess I did kind of cut loose,” she says.

What’s next for White? Her work on the Band-Aid drawings — which feature text for the first time — has been “relentless,” so she has enough art for another solo show immediately. She just put up a Web site (www.lucywhite.com) and hopes it will help market her art.
Meanwhile, she already has a new idea on the drawing board.

White smiles. “I’m making some Kraft macaroni and cheese paintings.”

Biennial art exhibitions, whether by invitation only or juried shows open to all, have become waypoints on the contemporary art landscape, providing artists and audiences alike a chance every couple of years to see what’s new, what’s happening, who’s hot, who’s arrived. As big, brawling, messy, and imperfect as they are, biennials are welcome events, if only for the fact that they give artists and art lovers something to talk about.

The most prestigious international biennials are the Venice Biennale, the 53rd edition of which will take place in 2009, and the Bienal de Sao Paulo, the 28th edition of which takes place October through December of this year in Brazil. The most important American biennial is the Whitney Biennial, the 74th of which was held earlier this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Maine is blessed with biennials at both the Portland Museum of Art and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport. CMCA (formerly known as Maine Coast Artists) is a non-profit, non-collecting institution that exhibits the best in Maine art year round in its barn-like gallery in coastal Rockport, home also to Maine Media Workshops, one of the East’s premier photography, film and video programs, and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, a well-known woodworking school.

CMCA, which has been mounting annual or biennial juried shows since 1978, is currently (through October 4) featuring the “2008 Biennial Juried Exhibition,” a marvelous free-for-all of new art by some 89 artists selected from among 737 artists who applied. The jury this year consisted of Carole Anne Meehan, curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; Scott Peterman, one of Maine’s best and best-known photographers; and Andrea Pollan, founding director of the Curator’s Office, an innovative art exhibition project in Washington, D.C.

When Maine biennials began in earnest in the late 1970s there was usually a lot of discussion and debate about who was legitimately a “Maine artist” and what constituted true “Maine art,” but in the pluralistic society of the 21st century these provincial designations have pretty much ceased to have meaning. The artists in the 2008 CMCA biennial run the gamut from native born Mainers to year-round residents, seasonal residents, former students at Maine schools, and artists who just visit the state. The art in the show demonstrates that “Maine art” now differs in no significant way from art made anywhere else in the global village. With a few exceptions, the CMCA biennial could easily be an exhibition of artists in Boston, Providence, or New York.

That said, the CMCA show does necessarily represent what is most popular in terms of art in Maine, that still being the tradition of landscape painting. In this vein, there are but few examples in the Rockport show — a house on the island of Vinalhaven painted by Connie Hayes, an icy seascape by Sarah Knock, that’s about it for tradition.

…

Finally, I would recommend Lucy White, an artist now working in Boston, as one of the most interesting painters to come out of Maine in recent years. Her “Church I” is one of her signature Band-Aid paintings, a church surrounded by crosses, all fashioned from Band-Aids. As with her “Concealed Weapons” paintings of guns, Lucy White is a wicked ironist, visually witty and philosophically on target most of the time.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posit a model of the modern individual as a schizophrenic Jekyll-and-Hyde born of nation-state control through the manufacture of desire and the free-market anarchy of capitalism rampantly commodifying all aspects of being.

Not a pretty picture to be sure, so no wonder a continuous line of switched-on artists over the course of modern history would seek to deliver wake-up calls to the infantilized masses still locked into a delivered mode of perception.

Enter the good folks at Zero Station who, tucked away in a converted gas station, have resolved to maintain a vigilant commitment to social change through the arts. The current group show, entitled “Take Me to Your Leader,” is an aesthetically pleasing collection of photography, illustration, graphic design and “couch art” intended to raise questions concerning global politics and personal accountability.

Is this didactic mind-expansion something the viewer desires from a piece of art? And if there is a good market for politicized art (pardon the commodification), then what distinguishes the effectiveness of an approach?

Lucy White provides a series of firearm-themed images that provide an example of this variance. Two handsome pieces encased in black resin portray silhouettes of a handgun. Revealed in the positive space of one gun is the image of an American flag and, in the other, NASDAQ stock listings. Both pieces play into a simple tactic of juxtaposition. The signs of “handgun” and “flag” are hurled at one another by the artist, to solicit within the viewer questions and connections regarding their interwoven signification.

Whether this dualistic approach really works may depend on whether you’re talking to Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. After all, we are constantly bombarded with messages inciting action so that the AIDS crisis in Africa can be addressed, health care can be provided for all Americans, and conflict resolved in the Middle East. We must cope with the cognitive dissonance of these problems within the parameters of our daily life. The result is, pessimistically, schizophrenic grumbling over the price of gas while filling up for the commute home in time to catch the evening news.

White exemplifies another method with “GUN PILE,” formulated by painted images of the gun silhouette haphazardly piled on top of one another in a somewhat fractal manner. Rather than juxtaposing two intellectual concepts, White deterritorializes the signifiers and constructs an entirely new piece as an ordered cosmos with its own beautiful validity.

For Deleuze, the standard of achievement (regarding whatever state of affairs a politicized artistic practice seeks to rectify) is “immanence,” an internal realization of one’s own potential outside of pre-established and judged norms. He states, “Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?”

At the risk of judgment, perhaps the best political art is that which inspires creative action by the perceiver. It may seem antithetical that a gallery dealing in commodities could lead the way for a local increase in creative action and awareness, but Zero Station makes clear its intentions to earnestly grapple with this paradox. The more the viewer/consumer is incited to become creator, the closer we become to harmonious interrelationships where politics are nullified.