An Whitlock – Rites and Recollections Press Release

“An Whitlock, Rites and Recollections” explores Whitlock’s three-decade career with the Christopher Cutts Gallery, presenting pieces from her first exhibition at the gallery, “An Whitlock” in 1993, to her latest exhibition, “New Work” in 2016.

Whitlock’s material-based practice took off in the early 1970s, with several of her pieces being included in a 1974 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, organized by the institution’s Women’s Committee. Since then, her continued explorations in material, non-objective form, and labour-intensive processes have created an oeuvre rich in experimental sculpture, installation, and photography, among other media.

Repetition, ritual, and memory are at the heart of Whitlock’s creative practice. Her 2006 Untitled series of buttons sewn on rag paper demonstrates her meticulous and almost obsessive dedication to process. Each button was sewn onto a grid by hand with a deliberate and laborious method developed through the artist’s intuitive understanding of material. Upon their first display in 2009, the series was met with denunciation from viewers who could not believe the buttons were sewn, insisting glue was involved —the results looked almost too ideal.

Further arduous and meditative processes are seen in the 1995 installation, (Dis)appearances, featuring hundreds of hand-cast bones arranged methodically on four tables. Whitlock happened upon a carcass of a deer that was hunted, as evidenced by the arrowhead lodged in its vertebrae, but escaped the clutches of its hunter before dying in the bushland near the artist’s home. Whitlock waited for the bones to process naturally, leaving the body to decompose over the seasons, and recovering the skeleton after many months. Each bone was meticulously moulded and cast in multiples, then organized on the tables for viewing. Alongside the tables, a cabinet displaying the moulds and casting materials used for the installation aestheticizes the process alongside the final art object.

The contemplative nature of Whitlock’s methods, through hundreds of repetitions over years at a time, gives her practice a ritualistic quality. Much of her practice is autobiographical, reflecting and representing periods of her life or the lives of her subject. 2016’s Bark/Bark/Bark, photographs of numerous trees’ bark, creates an index of the bushland near her home – more than half of the photographed trees have been cut down for developments since the series began.

Exhibited in 1995, Lost (for my sister), dedicated to Whitlock’s sister, who died as the piece was being created, features countless editions of hand-made gloves representing the prosthetic hand her grandfather wore. The gloves are rigid constructions stacked on handmade tables, juxtaposed with a photo showing both her grandfather’s prosthetic and real hand. Whitlock’s practice offers an avant-garde yet meditative approach to processing loss and evoking memory.

“An Whitlock, Rites and Recollections” emphasizes the breadth, scope, and impact of Whitlock’s exhibition history with the Christopher Cutts Gallery, revealing her skillful hand and visceral manipulation of materials. Each of the works on display reflects the tensions between process and object, repetition and variation, and ceremony and mass production.