Houses of the Holy Eric White, 2009. 12″ x 12″ oil on panel 2009

Pity the poor album cover. Once the artistic and marketing doorway to many great (and less than great) musical experiences, and the site of many a rolled joint, the old 12”x12” canvas has now been reduced to a little collection of pixels on your iPod screen. Seeing classic covers in their full size, from Houses of the Holy to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is no longer part of our day-to-day musical experience, but part of our collective past.
     That’s where Eric White’s latest exhibition, LP, comes in. Grabbing the classic covers of his childhood, the Brooklyn-based painter has taken the totemic images of classic covers, such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and rendered them in oil paint, mutating and twisting the familiar with a modern eye. Harry Belafonte’s Belafonte, a mainstay of baby-boomer collections, features a melted portrait of the singer, his mouth — his instrument — now gone, and the title reprinted in Arabic. Similarly the made-for-radio faces of The Knack are now swirls of paint and the title of their Get the Knack is now “Too Much Content”. And there, over these twisted faces, is the greatest clue to the mystery of LP.