Colette Whiten

Last updated
Colette Whiten
Born1945
Birmingham, England, United Kingdom
NationalityCanadian
Known for Sculptor, conceptual artist
Awards2013 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts

Colette Whiten (born 1945, Birmingham, England) is a sculptor, and installation and performance artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Whiten is a recipient of the Governor General's Medal. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Colette Whiten was born in Birmingham, England. [2] and graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1972, and was a recipient of the Governor General's Medal. [3]

Career

In contrast to the "Minimalism" of the 1960s and 1970s. Whiten's art included elements of performance in her sculptures by emphasizing the body processes involved in her work. She built stocks and scaffolding-like structures of wood, concrete blocks, and rope, [4] each of which she designed with a particular male model in mind. [5] [6] The scaffolding would then hold the models' bodies in predetermined poses, while a team worked to cast them in plaster. [7] In order to cast the bodies, Whiten would first shave the men and coat the body in petroleum jelly. [8] The casts were then used to produce fiberglass body parts.

For her 1972 exhibition at the Ontario College of Art, Whiten exhibited her body-part sculptures, along with the scaffolds that she used to create them, and photographic silkscreens and slide projections that she had taken to document the process of their creation. The effect was that the stocks resembled severed limbs, and the scaffolds torture devices. [9] Until 1975 the performance of creating the work was often as important as the final cast. [10]

Although Whiten's work reversed the more common gender roles between artist and model, [11] she denied that her work had a feminist agenda. One of her fiberglass pieces is a bust of a man sucking his thumb." [8]

Whiten's People Sculpture(1983) is a work of self-rusting steel panels with cutouts of figures that commissioned by the Sudbury Chamber of Commerce and stands in a small park at the corner of Brady and Paris streets in downtown Sudbury, Ontario. [12]

In the mid-1980s, Whiten's work took a new course when she began making small-scale stitched works. [13] The cross-stitched needlework's imagery was sourced from daily newspapers. The first series focussed on the male newsmakers of the world, specifically political leaders, represented in a traditionally female craft. The second series of needlepoint works again used images from media as sources, but of women. The women represented by the media are typically in groups, either mourning or protesting. [14]

In 1992, she returned to making large-scale works, this time making beaded images sourced from mass media events. In these works Whiten considers how media shapes an individual's understanding of current events. Some of the beaded images represented actual headlines from the news, while others source news photos. A number of these works were in the exhibition, Colette Whiten: Seducing the Receiver at the Oakville Galleries in Ontario. [15]

Whiten's sculpture La Scala, created in collaboration with Paul Kipps, is on outdoor public display in downtown Toronto. [16]

Whiten has taught at the Ontario College of Art. since 1974. She has also taught at York University from 1975 to 1977. [17]

Colette Whiten is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto. [18]

Awards and achievements

Upon graduation from the Ontario College of Art in 1972, Whiten received the Governor General's Academic Medal for her first cast piece exhibition. She also received Toronto Arts Foundation's Visual Arts Award in 1991. Whiten received the Governor General's Award in 2013 in the Visual and Media Arts category. [3]

Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florence Helena McGillivray</span>

Florence Helena McGillivray, also known as F H. McGillivray, was a Canadian landscape painter known for her Post-Impressionist style. Her family home was in Whitby, Ontario. She lived in Ottawa from 1914 to 1928. She was also a teacher. In 1916, on a visit to his studio, she encouraged Tom Thomson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">André Fauteux</span> Canadian sculptor

André Fauteux is a Canadian artist born in Dunnville, Ontario, Canada on March 15, 1946, who now lives in Toronto, Ontario. Fauteux is a sculptor known for his abstract welded steel sculpture, which is related to Geometric abstraction. His modernist sculptures are also related to the Formalist ideas associated with Clement Greenberg.

Sarindar Dhaliwal is a Canadian multi-media artist, based in Toronto.

Jin-Me Yoon is a South Korean-born internationally active Canadian artist, who immigrated to Canada at the age of eight. She is a contemporary visual artist, utilizing performance, photography and video to explore themes of identity as it relates to citizenship, culture, ethnicity, gender, history, nationhood and sexuality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isabel McLaughlin</span> Canadian artist (1903-2002)

Isabel McLaughlin, was a Modernist Canadian painter, patron and philanthropist. She specialized in landscapes and still life and had a strong interest in design.

Carol Lorraine Sutton is a multidisciplinary artist born in Norfolk, Virginia, USA and now living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a painter whose works on canvas and paper have been shown in 32 solo exhibits as well as being included in 94 group shows. Her work, which ranges from complete abstraction to the use of organic and architectural images, relates to the formalist ideas of Clement Greenberg and is noted for the use of color. Some of Sutton paintings have been related to ontology.

Stephen Andrews is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. Born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario, Andrews is known for using various media to explore matters such as memory and loss, and technology, and its representations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles</span>

Elizabeth Annie McGillivray Knowles was a Canadian landscape painter, known for her paintings of domestic animals, especially fowl.

Marla Hlady is a Canadian kinetic and sound artist who works in sculpture, drawing, sound and installation. She is a contemporary of Lois Andison, Simone Jones, Diane Landry and Daniel Olson.

Joanne Tod (R.C.A.) is a Canadian contemporary artist and lecturer whose paintings are included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurel Woodcock</span> Canadian artist and academic (1960–2017)

Laurel Elizabeth Woodcock was a Canadian artist and academic. She worked in many formats including installation, video, and sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ulayu Pingwartok</span> Inuk artist

Ulayu Pingwartok was a Canadian Inuk artist known for drawings of domestic scenes and nature.

Nancy Tousley is a senior art critic, journalist, art writer and independent curator whose practice has included writing for a major daily newspaper, art magazines, and exhibition catalogues.

Deirdre Logue is a Canadian video artist and arts administrator, based in Toronto, Ontario.

Jan Allen is a Canadian curator, writer, visual artist, and assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, and the Cultural Studies Program, at Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario.

Maura Doyle is a Canadian conceptual artist. She is best known for her controversial sculpture There's a New Boulder in Town.

Winsom is a Canadian-Jamaican Maroon multi-media artist working in textiles, painting, video, installations, and puppetry. Her work explores human spirituality.

Tim Whiten is an American-born Canadian artist who works in the areas of sculpture, drawing, performance art and multi-media installations, using a wide range of materials. He also has been an educator.

Lynn Donoghue was a painter, known for her portraits.

Louise Noguchi is a Canadian multidisciplinary visual artist who uses video, photography, sculpture, and installation to examine notion of identity, perception and reality.

References

  1. ↑ "Colette Whiten". The Canadian Encyclopedia.
  2. ↑ Jules Heller; Nancy G. Heller (19 December 2013). North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. Routledge. pp. 576–. ISBN   978-1-135-63882-5.
  3. 1 2 Zemans, Joyce. "Colette Whiten". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2016-03-05.
  4. ↑ Alex Mogelon; Norman Laliberté (December 1974). Art in boxes. Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN   978-0-442-24609-9.
  5. ↑ Liz Dawtrey (1996). Investigating Modern Art . Yale University Press. pp.  151–. ISBN   978-0-300-06797-2.
  6. ↑ Arts Canada. Society for Art Publications. 1978.
  7. ↑ Gunda Lambton (1994). Stealing the Show: Seven Women Artists in Canadian Public Art. McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. pp. 112–. ISBN   978-0-7735-1189-7.
  8. 1 2 Chandler, John Noel (Spring 1972). "Colette Whiten: Her working and work". Artscanada: 44–45.
  9. ↑ Mark, Lisa Gabrielle (2007). Colette Whiten. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 315. ISBN   978-0-914357-99-5.
  10. ↑ Burnett, Schiff., David G, Marilyn (183). Contemporary Canadian Art. , 1983. Print. Edmonton, Alta.: Hurtig in co-operation with the Art Gallery of Ontario. pp.  234. ISBN   978-0-88830-242-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. ↑ Fischer, Barbara (1996). "Wounded and Marked". Love Gasoline. Toronto: Mercer Union.
  12. ↑ Lambton, G. (1994). Stealing the show : seven women artists in Canadian public art. p. 113. OCLC   180704169.
  13. ↑ Robert James Belton (January 2001). Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture. University of Calgary Press. pp. 360–. ISBN   978-1-55238-011-6.
  14. ↑ Rhodes, Richard (1992). Colette Whiten: New Needleworks. Toronto: Power Plant. p. 5. ISBN   978-0-921047-88-9.
  15. ↑ Fleming, Marnie (1995). Colette Whiten: Seducing the Receiver. Oakville, Ont.: Oakville Galleries. ISBN   978-0-921027-59-1.
  16. ↑ John Warkentin (2010). Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto. Becker Associates. pp. 192–. ISBN   978-0-919387-60-7.
  17. ↑ "Colete Whiten". Canadian Council for the Arts. Archived from the original on 2014-11-26.
  18. ↑ Logograph. "ARTISTS". Susan Hobbs. Retrieved 2016-03-05.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.