Tim Whiten’s prolific career and extensive creative practice reflects his broad-ranging metaphysical interests. This solo exhibition features a selection of early to recent work – from the late 1970s onward – exploring Whiten’s ongoing investigations into the nature of consciousness and its effect on the world. In his over fifty years of creating cultural objects, Whiten has come to understand creativity as an essentially spiritual activity, inspired by ancient mythologies and processes of material transformation. He frequently works with glass, a precarious medium he has used skillfully since the 1980s, highlighting its luminosity and transparency as a key to infinity and divine knowledge. His use of viscerally-charged organic materials (including wood, bone, hair and leather) unite the everyday with the esoteric and extends to two and three-dimensional forms, site specific works, ritual performances and mixed-media installations.

Elemental is part of an expanded, multi-venue retrospective and collaborative publication of Tim Whiten’s career developed between the Art Gallery of Peterborough, Art Gallery of York University, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and McMaster Museum of Art from 2022 to 2023. This series of curated exhibition projects are thematically united by the classical elements of air, water, earth, and fire – referencing Whiten’s interest in alchemical practices. Elemental: Ethereal touches on aspects of the air element with its associations to the celestial, ephemeral and intangible. Here, evocative three-dimensional works mediate transcendence and transformative states of being, marking the passages between life and death towards the eternal. Whiten’s profound understanding of relics, sacred symbols, magic and ancestral knowledge are unbounded by time and space, emphasizing the importance of spiritual illumination and wonder throughout human existence.

Tim Whiten was born in Inkster, Michigan in 1941. In 1964, he received a B.S. from Central Michigan University, College of Applied Arts and Science, and in 1966 completed his M.F.A. at the University of Oregon, School of Architecture and Allied Arts. After immigrating to Canada in 1968, he taught in the Department of Visual Arts at York University for 39 years. An award-winning educator, he was also Chair of the University’s Department of Visual Arts where he is currently Professor Emeritus. Since 1962, he has had work presented in exhibitions throughout North America and internationally and it is included in numerous private, public, and corporate collections, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (both the de Young and the Legion of Honor/ Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts). Based in Toronto, Tim Whiten is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

Watch now: Tim Whiten in Conversation with Erika DeFreitas

The museum acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Image: Tim Whiten, [detail] Book of Light: Containing Poetry from the Heart of God, 2015-2016. Handcrafted crystal clear glass, burnt fragments of drawings (coffee and pencil on handmade paper), oak, 118.1 (h/l) x 71.1 (w) x 38.1 (d) cm. Courtesy of Tim Whiten and Olga Korper Gallery. Photo Credit: Toni Hafkenscheid.