Clara Maria Apostolatos speaks with artists Pam Lins and Roger White on assembly as method and encounter, as their practices come together in a joint exhibition.
The exhibition title Laterness suggests a slippery sense of timing—an arrival after the fact, unhurried but under pressure. Those conditions shape the joint exhibition by Pam Lins and Roger White at Uffner & Liu, where the two-person format is less a matter of synchronous affinity than a way of allowing meaning to take shape through delay and process.
White has worked primarily in painting and in making calendars that chart time far into the future. Here, he presents a new body of cut-and-dyed paper works: textured images of everyday life constructed slowly through accumulation and revision. Lins, known for assembling disparate materials into balanced sculptural forms, shows works built from altered USPS flat-rate boxes, pitched off-kilter, with perched hand-made ceramic birds. These are misidentified or fabricated species drawn from an encyclopedic survey of birds, introducing a note of artifice and uncertainty into an already imbalanced architecture.
Across White’s collages, Lins’s sculptures, and a newly produced collaborative work, meaning emerges through surface accumulation where materials are cut, stacked, and reworked until they hold together. Images and their meaning take shape gradually, remaining open to delay and contingency. In the conversation that follows, Lins and White reflect on Laterness as a method and mood, shaped by urgency and slowness, humor and unease.
CMA: In a way, this feels like a continuation of the exhibition text, which is already structured as a conversation. A two-person show does something similar—it sets different practices into relation. You’ve known each other for years—did working toward a two-person show change how you talked to each other about your work, or how you made it?
PL: We’ve known each other for a long time, but we live in different cities, so we don’t actually see each other that often. It’s not like we run into each other regularly.
RW: I don’t really run into anyone. But it was nice to have an excuse to be in dialogue more. That feels very common now—unless there’s a project, you don’t always stay in close contact. So the show was a good reason to be in touch.
PL: I’ve known Roger’s work for a long time—I don’t even know how many years, maybe fifteen. This was a chance to bring that familiarity into an actual dialogue. Roger’s also a really good writer and editor, so I felt lucky to be in that kind of exchange.
RW: I did too. And our friendship didn’t suffer through the collaboration—which isn’t always the case. That conversation about how our practices might come together became more focused once we were invited to do the show in late spring or early summer, which wasn’t a huge lead time. But it was enough to think through some options. Pretty early on, Pam suggested a collaborative element—the works in the front room. At the same time, we were both very much in the middle of our own studio practices. So I tried to select one aspect of what I was already working on that could enter into dialogue with Pam’s work.
PL: Which it does. We talked a lot about the format of the two-person show—which you don’t actually see that often. On a practical level, I make sculpture and Roger works on the wall, so the installation was fairly straightforward. But we were also both working very hands-on, assembling elements in the studio. In that sense, we ended up being strangely well-matched.
CMA: Something that struck me across both bodies of work is a shared sense of outsideness—of not quite belonging—which also connects to this idea of laterness. It shows up differently for each of you. Pam, in the way your sculptures inhabit a kind of nowhereness, with fabricated birds perched on intervened USPS flat-rate boxes tied to transit and circulation rather than place; and Roger, in the calendars, which project time forward into a future that’s imaginable and concrete, but also strangely disorienting. I’m curious how that feeling of existing between places or times connects to your work, and to laterness as a concept linking the two practices.
PL: Laterness is a bit unruly but it presents a framework without specific parameters of time. The title Laterness came after we both read an essay by David Joselitz and Pamela Lee, Six Propositions After Trump’s Second Victory, where he talks about “lateness” in regards to Fascism. He proposes different ideas about what’s always been there, but also presents a hopeful situation of art and its slowness.
RW: With the title, we initially thought about time constraints in a somewhat jokey way—finishing the work, writing the press release. But more substantially, it speaks to a sense of temporal displacement. When I first visited Pam’s studio and began imagining my work alongside hers, I felt we were both engaging early-20th-century sensibilities—you were borrowing and reworking modernist motifs, while I was having some feelings about Cubism. That pushed me toward ideas that feel passé but also strangely future-facing, or out of sync with the present. That disjointedness was something I wanted to carry into the work.
PL: The work is also about the future of our mediums: their histories, but also where they might be headed. There’s a precarity and urgency in both bodies of work, a made-by-hand quality that I hope heightens the viewer’s experience. In my case, that future element comes through in the characters in my work—they aren’t human, and they reference things that still exist but feel as though they’re disappearing.
RW: Like the post office.
PL: Yes—like the post office, which I love and hope never disappears.
RW: For me, there’s also something about getting older, and the strange optimism of the phrase “mid-career.” It always feels funny to me, because how do you know you’re not post-career? That sense of coming late, of not having enough time, animates some of our ideas and conversations, and feeds into this idea of laterness.
PL: I think it’s funny, though, because if I remember correctly, Clara, you said that both of us share a feeling of being outsiders?
CMA: I’d describe it more as the works sharing a sense of not quite belonging, an in-between state—of things pointing toward meaning without fully landing. The calendars do something funny with time. They map time in a real and concrete way, but the experience of it stays strangely abstract. That’s how laterness feels to me—I can wrap my brain around it, but it isn’t a thing in itself. It feels like the absence of the present—something just beyond reach.
PL: Close to a thing.
CMA: Exactly—close to a thing.
PL: And maybe that closeness itself defines the outside—being near, but not fully inside.
RW: Right. And for me, laterness carries a very modest hope that there will be something after this moment. We’ve agreed that the present, politically especially, is not great. So the hope is tentative, even a little awkward like the word.
CMA: Staying with questions of time, I wanted to shift to process. In both bodies of work, meaning seams assembled rather than simply represented. How much of the thinking happens in the doing? Does construction slow things down, or does it actually speed up certain decisions?
PL: I try to reach a point where I have all these elements I’m working with, and I allow myself to pour them into the work. In this case, the meaning came toward the end of the time I had. I probably would have kept pushing things around otherwise. I think of them as fictions in the making—there’s a lot of meaning in construction itself, and in the materials. The boxes play with scale; the wet and dry materials show drips, so you’re aware of time passing. And the ceramic pieces go through a lot to get where they are. That process matters.
RW: When we first talked about the show, you said you wanted to make everything by hand—not as a big, elaborate production, but something done within the constraints of the studio. That was part of the meaning. For me too, making things by hand does something. It feels oppositional to the preference for speed, smoothness, and easy legibility in contemporary culture. If something is materially and interpretively cobbled together, or put together slowly, that material resistance becomes part of the work.
PL: I think “cobbled” is a good word.
RW: Yeah—cobbled is right. Ironically, I started making these because the paintings had gotten slower and slower. I was spending six or eight months on a single work and thought, I’ll do something fast and loose. But of course, this became even slower and more complicated than painting. And I think that question—how the formal elements relate to the interpretive conditions—is really what this kind of making is about.
CMA: This feels like a real shift from painting. Do you see yourself continuing to work with this paper-tearing approach?
RW: Yes. There’s more I want to understand—what these works might become as I keep making them. There’s a different set of variables here. I thought I’d start with an idea and simply execute it, but that never worked. When it was too straightforward, it felt boring; when it became too abstract, it slipped into a kind of craft territory that made me uncomfortable. So I kept moving back and forth. One advantage is that you can literally take things apart and reassemble them—it’s a very flexible process.
PL: That goes back to the question of whether we’d ever stop pushing things around without a deadline. “Finish” is often overrated. With these cut paper constructions, it’s also about how the body encounters them. From a distance, you think you’re seeing an image; as you move closer, the materials and layers come into focus. Your relationship to the work shifts as you move through space, and that experience feeds back into the pictorial element. That transformation is really compelling to me.
CMA: The collaborative works in the entrance are composite forms held together entirely by pressure, without adhesive. That felt significant in relation to everything we’ve been talking about—instability, precarity, time pressure, balance, collaboration. What does it mean for you to trust pressure, rather than permanence, as the force that holds these works together?
PL: There’s so much meaning in the word pressure. They were really forced in there—through a lot of trial and error to get the channel just right, the exact thickness and width. It came down to getting them just tight enough to sit there securely. I kept imagining I’d come to the gallery and find one on the floor, but it hasn’t happened. The paper almost acts like a cushion—it compresses slightly and holds itself in place.
RW: It also came together really fast.
PL: Insanely fast.
RW: Pam had the structure and the plan—I just did the surfaces. They’re related to Friedrich Kiesler’s Galaxies, but there’s also something funny about it: two things jammed together, much like two artists in a two-person show. There’s a kind of comedy in that stuckness that I enjoy.
PL: For me, it’s important to do something in the gallery. As someone who makes sculpture, it’s not that exciting to just move work from the studio into the space—you want to build the show. That’s always a bit of a risk, but this one really surprised us. How it worked, how it sat in space, how we worked together—it was all unexpected. And I think it’s good to leave room to be surprised.
CMA: I also really loved the poster that projects a future November 6—when this exhibition opened—that happens to fall on a Thursday again, as it did this year. It feels like a funny way of marking a future moment of synchronicity—between the two of you now, and some distant alignment later. As a way of closing: what do you hope to carry forward to that year?
PL: I think this is where the idea of laterness is helpful for me. I’m not someone who plans very far into the future—I tend to live in the present. And art-making, especially the way I work, keeps me there. The calendars gesture toward a future moment that’s tangible in one sense—you can name the day—but also indescribable to me. It’s there, but it’s not something I can fully imagine.RW: I don’t even want to do the math—I think it was 2053? Absolutely not. The whole thing kind of panics me. On some level, the calendars hold that panic: the idea that we know almost nothing about that moment except that, if there were a show on November 6, 2053, it would fall on a Thursday. Beyond that, everything is unknown.
