String music, improvised

Installation art often calls for creative improvisation, adjusting to the space at hand. But Pae White, who has filled the lobby of the UCLA Hammer Museum with a series of whimsical mobiles, didn’t expect quite so many changes.

“Ninety percent of this show is different from what I had planned,” says White, whose colorful columns of cut paper suspended on string evoke flocks of birds in flight.

After the fire marshal made a visit, nearly everything had to be shifted or altered. It was frustrating, she says, a “crazy ballet of trying to make things work in a zone of off-limits.” But it’s also led to a lot of happy surprises.

The piece “Second City,” a single column made up of hundreds of hexagons, was to be accompanied by a second column. Two, however, would have blocked the doors leading to the parking garage. So she axed one and moved the other under a spotlight in the two-story lobby. “The light creates an architecture,” she says, “and that was a fantastic surprise.”

The Hammer usually uses this lobby space to showcase the work of emerging artists, although White has moved beyond that category. She’s not only listed in Taschen’s reference book “Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century,” her work graces its cover.

James Elaine, curator of Hammer Projects, thought White’s mobiles would enliven the entry. “What’s so interesting about them is how they occupy space,” he says. “They deal with the architecture around them, yet they’re translucent or permeable.” They are joyous and playful, he says; even light air currents will move them around. “They play with the lights, play with the architecture, play with the people coming in viewing them.”

White launched her career from Southern California. She was raised in Pasadena, majored in art at Scripps College in Claremont and later studied at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. In addition to solo exhibitions at Los Angeles’ China Art Objects, she’s had solo shows abroad, including at Galerie Francesca Kaufman in Milan, Italy, and Daniel Buchholz in Cologne, Germany. This show at the Hammer, however, is the first solo exhibition of her installation work at an American museum.

Her early exposure to Pop Art style started with the bold, colorful linens by the designer Vera that graced her home. There were also visits to the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art), where she distinctly remembers seeing an Andy Warhol show.

“The best gift I ever got as a child was from my aunt,” she says. “It was a big box, and in it was a bag of dried macaroni, some string, some tissue paper, a couple pairs of scissors -- just mixed media stuff.” Even at the age of 7, she immediately recognized it as a cornucopia of creative potential. “I think I made a model of the solar system with it. A little 2-D, a little 3-D,” says White, now 41.

As a child she also met Millard Sheets; his granddaughter was her best friend. They visited his studio in Northern California, where White saw firsthand the life of a working artist. “It was beyond just having fun in the studio,” she recalls. “It was about having a degree of seriousness, of discipline.”

In her own studio in Highland Park, a similar mix of fun and seriousness is on view. White, who has long, slightly frizzy brown hair and a dryly bemused air about her, has filled the space with a flurry of drawings, half-finished wire birdcages and paper cutouts. A lot of her work is labor intensive. Each mobile at the Hammer is made up of hundreds of paper pieces. Some, like the pieces for “Second City,” “Nightfish” and “Aviary” have been entirely hand-cut with scissors. Even those that have die-cut pieces, like “Oroscopo,” had to be manually assembled.

Two weeks before the opening, the lobby of the Hammer was a temporary artist’s workshop. For White, these paper-and-string mobiles were a way “to get mass” without the weight of less manageable material such as wood or metal. But they required delicate handling.

White enlisted her assistant, two art students and her husband, Tom Marble, to help assemble the individual sections of “Oroscopo.” (That’s Italian for “horoscope,” but White just chose the word for all the O’s.) For each section, six circular pieces are threaded onto a string, then held at intervals by dots of glue. Marble, an architect, patiently stacked the preassembled pieces, which looked like cartoon eyes.

“Some ideas come out of the chaos you can find in nature -- a flurry of birds, a bunch of fish underwater,” she says. The “eye” pieces of “Oroscopo” were inspired by the pattern on peacock feathers.

Titles are another point of departure. The hot tropical colors of “Aviary,” which straddles the balustrade on the second floor, evokes a band of toucans. “Nightfish,” hanging high in the center of the lobby, is made up of thin oval shapes mostly in blues, with a smattering of yellows and reds, as one might find in a school of fish.

“I wanted there to be that reading, as a point of departure. And then, hopefully, something else will happen,” White says.

Other effects come about serendipitously. “ ‘Oroscopo’ is really experimental -- the show isn’t that interesting to me unless there’s some amount of that,” she says. In “Oroscopo,” the paper pieces are hung low to the floor of the landing, in an undulating pattern that White hopes visitors will walk in and out of. “I wanted to see what would happen if it were like walking in a pond: What does it mean to look down on a sculpture which is looking up at you?”

She’s looking for agility -- from her artworks and its viewers. “The most interesting art objects -- to me -- don’t offer too much restriction. The interpretation isn’t too congealed,” she explains. “My ideal viewer is someone who doesn’t approach the work and confine it, but who lets it take them places.”

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Pae White

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 13.

Cost: $5 adults, $3 seniors. Free for students, UCLA faculty and staff, visitors 17 and younger, and everyone on Thursdays.

Info: (310) 443-7020