Artist Statement – Paul White

This body of work emerges from a transient interior—an in-between space where perception loosens and the familiar begins to dissolve. Within the enclosed movement of a vehicle, the car wash becomes an immersive field of shifting light, water, and motion, where surfaces fracture and reform in continuous flux.

The windshield acts as both barrier and filter, softening and distorting what lies beyond it. Water, light, and reflection collapse depth and obscure origin, leaving forms that hover between recognition and abstraction.

These images are not documents but traces—fragments of a fleeting experience, reworked through digital intervention. Color is intensified, contrast heightened, and the frame narrowed to isolate moments of visual uncertainty. Through this process, the work moves away from description and toward sensation.

The car wash, typically a place of routine, becomes a space where perception begins to drift. Time feels suspended, and the ordinary slips into something fluid and indeterminate.

In this space, the image is not fixed but becoming—an unstable threshold where form appears, dissolves, and reappears again.