Opening reception: Friday, September 13, 6:30 – 9 pm.
Press Release
The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present Ambient Plagues, an exhibition by sculpture and installation artist Elaine Whittaker.
Have you walked out of a pandemic movie lately with the hair raised on the back of your neck? Not because of the throes of flesh eating zombies but because the guy who sat beside you was coughing the whole time? We are surrounded by microbes, are composed of microbes, and we are terrified of them. We live in a porous world, in porous bodies. The possibility of being breached, infected, and losing body integrity is always present.
Ambient Plagues is a mixed media installation that explores this invisible world, a world teeming with microbial life, and the possibility of infection. Microbes are sublime, beautiful, but we can’t see them. They keep us alive, but they can make us sick, even causing death. The art works in Ambient Plagues make them visible. Through sculpture, photography, microscopy, and live bacteria, the artworks blur the boundaries between what is real and what is manufactured, what is animate and what is inanimate. Ultimately, they challenge viewers’ perceptions about their bodies, a site that has become trespassed, tainted, and contaminated by a popular culture that escalates social anxiety and terror of microbes, by artificially creating a sense of bioparanoia.
Elaine Whittaker is a visual artist creating mixed media sculptures, encaustic paintings, photo-based imagery and installations that intersect art, science, medicine, and the environment. Her art has been in solo and group exhibits, nationally and internationally, and received awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She is included in a number of private and corporate collections. She holds a BFA in Visual Art from York University, Toronto, a Fine Arts diploma from the Toronto School of Art, and a BA in Anthropology from Carleton University, Ottawa.
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