TETHER
Saturday, June 20, 2009, Globe & Mail
This powerful installation, Tether, by Toronto-based artist Elaine Whittaker is a dazzlingly complex and quite moving attempt to answer the question "How do we recognize the energy that connects and propels us?" In this walk-in meditation upon and demonstration of the forces that bind us to one another, Whittaker has constructed human nerves.
Tether, the gallery notes, "reflects on the process of grief through the lens of the science of nerves and electricity." In addition to grief, Tether also could reflect upon any other human emotion in this sublime laboratory demonstration.
The installation begins with a photograph of the exposed back of Whittaker herself. It's attached to a "spinal cord" of rope and wire that unravels through a vast but delicate compendium of electro-conductive "salted wire grids" of "neuro-dynamic tendrils" hanging down into the the gallery (a machine for processing and transmitting refined grief).
The cord then gradually rebinds, and flows into an electrical breaker box positioned over a second big photograph - of her father's now empty, abandoned robe. The arm of the breaker box is switched to off: all passion is momentarily spent, but, presumably, it's easily powered up again.
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Dreadful Visitations: Art meets mad cow
July 15, 2006. Toronto Star
Elaine Whittaker is a slight woman, with a fierce intelligence and a willingness to look into the heart of darkness -- in this case, at the array of microbial visitations from "SARS, AIDS, HIV, Ebola, West Nile, mad cow disease (and) flesh-eating bugs," say the notes for "Dreadful Visitations: Installations by Elaine Whittaker," the cheekily intelligent show at Redhead Gallery (401 Richmond St. W., Suite 115) until July 22. Whittaker is cofounder of the Connective Tissue Collective, five artists who deal with issues that connect health and art. "Dreadful Visitations" explores the curious conundrum of "an increasingly porous" world — where virulent pandemics may travel globally in no time at all — that has nevertheless spawned societies "obsessed with defining boundaries." Whittaker is brilliant at defining boundaries. "Dreadful Visitations" is delightfully organized. Miasma (2006) is a wall filled with 123 blue respirator masks each sporting a different microbe done in gouache. You can almost imagine the whole thing eventually being rendered as wallpaper. The Swarm (2006) uses dozens of dead mosquitoes to add fine flecks of black against a bone-white background. Microbial Passage (2002) references a sailing yacht while Zoonosis (2006) — a series of wire boxes holding chicken bones studded with salt crystals — is a reference, says the artist, to avian flu. "I worried we could lose our birds," she tells me.
Peter Goddard