Colette Whiten

Early life and education

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

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, each of which she designed with a particular male model in mind. The scaffolding would then hold the models' bodies in predetermined poses, while a team worked to cast them in plaster. In order to cast the bodies, Whiten would first shave the men and coat the body in petroleum jelly. 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. Until 1975 the performance of creating the work was often as important as the final cast.

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

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.

In the mid-1980s, Whiten's work took a new course when she began making small-scale stitched works. 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.

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.

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

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

Colette Whiten is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto.

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.

Selected exhibitions