After an extended closure due to provincial regulations, McMaster Museum of Art is thrilled to share that it will be reopening its doors on Wednesday, February 9th!

As part of the winter 2022 exhibition program, we are pleased to announce the opening of  two new solo exhibitions by artists nichola feldman-kiss and Tim Whiten.

nichola feldman-kiss \ Scapegoat
Curated by Pamela Edmonds and Mona Filip
February 9 – March 18, 2022 (delayed from a January 4 opening due to the pandemic)

nichola feldman-kiss is an artist researching corporeality, identity, and autobiography. Their process-rich practice is a relational exploration of body and embodiment, witness and traumatic memory, statelessness and belonging, empathy and collectivity. feldman-kiss’ hybrid media installations – pristine as laboratory craft – critique the colonial paradigm (the violent ingestion of land, resources, peoples and cultures), and ask us to reconsider difficult questions about what it means to be conscious social bodies in the contemporary moment.

The exhibition, which includes photography, audio, video, digital and performance interventions, lays bare the entanglements of the globalized order that insist rights onto some, while withholding the same entitlements from others. Scapegoat is a provocation and an elegy, attending to generational traumas through dignity and defiance.

The museum and the artist acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.

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

Tim Whiten’s prolific career and extensive creative practice reflects his broad-ranging metaphysical interests. This solo exhibition features a selection of Whiten’s three-dimensional 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 on 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.

The museum acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.