Tim Whiten
Elemental: Ethereal
Curated by Pamela Edmonds
February 10 – May 14, 2022 

This winter, McMaster Museum of Art is pleased to present Elemental: Ethereal, a solo exhibition by Canadian image maker Tim Whiten on view from February 10 to May 14, 2022. The exhibition, curated by Pamela Edmonds, features a selection of Whiten’s three-dimensional works from the late 1970s onward reflecting Whiten’s broad-ranging metaphysical interests.

Tim Whiten’s prolific career and extensive creative practice is concerned with humanity’s place in the scheme of life as well as the nature of consciousness. Michigan born and Toronto-based, his expansive visual vocabulary has been described as being formulated outside of conventional art historical discourse and Western notions of linear thought. Whiten 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) unites the everyday with the esoteric.

Spanning across the Levy and Tomlinson galleries on the fourth floor of the museum, Elemental: Ethereal touches on aspects of the air element with its associations to the celestial, ephemeral and intangible through works that mediate transcendence and transformative states of being. Considering the exhibition, Pamela Edmonds, Senior Curator at McMaster Museum of Art says, “As we live through the challenges of this global pandemic, the art world is seeing a renewed interest in spirituality as more artists turn to theological iconography and mysticism in a quest for meaning. For more than five decades, Tim Whiten has continued to make profound works exploring sacred and ancestral knowledge. This exhibition offers a space for reflection through Whiten’s deep understanding of the connections between material transformation and the human condition.”

Elemental is part of an expanded, multi-venue retrospective 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 exhibitions are thematically united by the classical elements of air, water, earth, and fire – a reference to Whiten’s interest in alchemical processes.

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.