The Christopher Cutts Gallery is proud to present our upcoming exhibition “An Whitlock, Rites and Recollections.” This exhibition will explore Whitlock’s three-decade career with the CCG, presenting pieces from her first exhibition at the gallery, “Making Waves” 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 bones after a few months. Each bone was then meticulously moulded and cast in multiples and then organized on tables for viewing. Beside the tables, a cabinet displaying the moulds and casting materials used for the installation aestheticizes the process alongside the final object.
