Tim Whiten.

Sayej, Nadja

Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto CANADA June 5 * July 31, 2008

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For his seventh solo show at Olga Korper, Tim Whiten, the 67-year-old Michigan-born sculptor who has lived in Toronto for the past 25 years, seems to have created a fantastical lost-and-found department. Featuring two spray-enamel drawings and six sculptures, his "Up, Down, In-Between" show exhibits an extraordinary twist on the ordinary. But watch your step--there's a lot of glass around.

Whiten, a professor of visual arts at York University in Toronto, stumbled upon glass eight years ago, and has since used it as a cold kind of Plasticine to construct objects like leveling rulers, bricks, brooms, and dangling cone-shaped ornaments. He now uses matte (instead of clear) glass to craft objects, in this case a rolling pin, a telescope, and a vast umbrella. In all his efforts, Whiten inevitably suggests that these objects are more fragile than they are. Like the soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, he uses everyday objects we're accustomed to, while leaving the comic relief aside. Rather, these objects are quietly elegant like the works of New York-based sculptor Noah Sheldon. The unconventional (yet subtle) choice of industrial glass also echoes the works of Louise Bourgeois, Michael Snow, and Richard Serra.

Kanopi (2008), a slump glass umbrella held together by thin strips of brass, is by far the most commanding piece in the show. Drained of color as if the rain has already passed through, it creates the odd impression that it hardly needs the ghost of Mary Poppins, just natural light, to cast a glow. When light passes through glass, there is yet another show of fragility. Even the shadows the sculptures cast on the gallery's concrete floor are uniquely motley muddled shapes. Then if you look through some of the works, you view yet another lightshow. Thus In-Sintilate (2008) contains a little cosmic rainbow. This glass telescope--yes, all telescopes typically use glass, though this time it is glass from head to toe, including the tripod--looks like something you might see on an astronomer's rooftop or perhaps some swanky yacht. Pointing up to the gallery's moon-like round window, it does not magnify the stars, only a smattering of glass beads sprinkled across the lens.

This telescope is already the unfolding of shapes and colors we associate with the kaleidoscope, but here we are already inside the device rather than just looking through it. We are deeply inside Tim Whiten's genealogy of glass, our vision wrapped up within multiple lenses. This sapphire-blue and fuchsia Op art apparition, calling to mind Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely, reveals another world entirely, the one where reality and fantasy collide, the most fragile world of all.