Colette Whiten

Exhibition showcasing the work of Colette Whiten. Whiten most recent body of work has been focused on creating striking, large, sculptures resembling nude men, almost mummified. 

Statement from Globe and Mail by John Bentley Mays: 

“Miss Whiten gives an important clue when she says of the four casts in the show: “They are much stronger than what went before, because they are more to the point” —The point presumably, toward which she has been working all along.  

What this can easily be discovered by looking — soberly without preconceptions — at the pieces themselves. Like so many of her previous works, they are concave sculptures of nude men, made in a way obvious from the physical Constuction themselves. First, she has wrapped the fore (in one sculpture) or aft (in the other three) of a man in damp surgical gauze, the packed burlap soaked in plaster on the gauze, then waited out the hour or so it took for the plaster to harden.  

Next the man goes out of the cast, leaving behind a finely molded impression of himself (and maybe a little body hair). Later, Miss Whiten accentuated the concave moldings by rubbing graphite over them. Miss Whiten’s subjects, by their own admission, have found the process about as gruesome as a sauna. And the artistic result of their ordeal are very handsome, finely modelled depictions of nude men, about as horrifying as art school figure drawings of male models.  

In fact, these pieces are best read as rigorous, straightforwardly honest and intimate drawings of the bodies of the artist's friends.  

Miss Whiten herself calls them “points of contact between myself and my friends.”