The New Yorker: Goings on About Town: Wendy White

In “Mark and Phil,” this New York artist’s first exhibition at the Denny Dimin gallery, in Tribeca, the digital and the analog overlap in a hallucinatory, cartoony world. Sculptures reminiscent of gloomy emojis (black rainbows, clouds, teardrops) are paired with trompe-l’oeil paintings, at once grand and scrappy, depicting plywood carved with graffiti. The show’s centerpiece is a large, low-hanging mobile of black enamel rods and chains—you might call its style “playground goth”—whose dangling shapes include an L.E.D. light in the jagged shape of a pixelated heart, a bright spot that recalls an Instagram sticker. The social-media-inflected mood of the sculptures is both matched and expanded on in White’s paintings, whose faux-wood surfaces inevitably evoke boarded-up windows. Bubble letters spell out expressions of love (“Shaz + Joanne”) as well as ennui (“IM BORED”), merging the graphic aesthetic of TikTok with the tradition of handmade marks, from school-desk doodles to the painted caves of Lascaux.