In 2024 I had a premonition of something un-stoppable coming. I channeled this intensity into a pastel series with a waterbird frozen in split-second time that I had photographed. In every era the bird has been known as a vessel for transition and outstretched wings are the gesture belonging to the phoenix. The bird figures in my drawings witness worlds that they could at any moment, abandon.
My compositions mushroomed in 2025 after experiencing the Los Angeles wildfire disaster. Having witnessed that history I document a reality that includes the archetypal opposites of fiery apocalypse and a garden of renewal.

When I was visiting Los Angeles I drove north several hours to see tectonic fault-lines, and discovered wildfire had erupted that day. On the drive back into the city limits the night sky above Topanga Canyon glowed red as people evacuated.
Collective trauma, reminiscent of the historical crises during 9/11 in NYC, enveloped me.
During that era I made pictures that combined shadowy figures of mythic gods, snippets from poems and glyphic words such as Afghani for “brotherly love”that float in life-sized fields.
And just as then in downtown NYC, LA skies rained down small pieces of ash upon us.

“What does it mean to inhabit a land of extremes that is increasingly under threat of disaster?”

I hunkered down for days before returning to New York.
I watched the news and stole its imagery. My theme mushroomed to incorporate LA’s terrain, its places and fragments dreamt up by its film industry. My portraits of LA serve as both historical record and a metaphorical site of transformation.
I visited the ACADEMY FILM MUSEUM that houses Dorothy’s ruby slippers. I recalled they were instrumental in promoting her return home; but here they were, safe inside a plexiglass box.
My LA pictures contrast the whimsical Wizard of Oz with the visceral reality of fires that destroyed homes and lives. Between the “dream” of home and the fragility of our physical environment lies a tense narrative that advocates for the protection of our shared environment and humanity. Ultimately my work documents a world in flux, hoping to find a path toward preservation within the ashes of transformation.

Large Pastels

— Review from the VILLAGE STAR REVIEW; JUNE 2025; by LEE KLEIN

The rolling hills and mountains of Southern California the biosphere the range of climates from desert to snow covered peaks roamed by mountain goats, in one cable car ride the soaring mountains over the sea the vertigo of a place prone to earthquakes, fire, floods, mudslides, a virtual sim city real time life on a movie set, in a movie setting.

What inspired David Hockney, the golden sunshine the movement of topographical features like hyper-suggestive outlines in a Howard Hodgkin painting, this is where the experimental filmmaker and painter Lili White found herself witness to its landscape and its human encroachments during violently transforming wildfires of 2025.

This is hot color this is hot hot hotness the outlines of images like waves spreading over other pictorial terrains, fire in a sizzling blaze along the seams of our imagination.

Working in pastels, White captures the sizzling oozing neon of this place in time: birds and cars move around and through blazes, oil derricks, bridges, flaming flamingo cartoons, a whole range of wildly divergent colors.

Here White is like a canary in coal mine, a canary in a gold mine, in the land of untold riches, ablaze in a vehicular grand slalom coursing through lighting both artificial and natural under circumstances unexpected and previously unknown, which bespeaks the world of Ginza lights in Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID. An endgame for it is just within a hair’s breath of an apocalypse.

Small Pastels