Danse 1998–2000

Between 1998 and 2000, Whiten developed a sited work for the Tree Museum, a sprawling art park near Gravenhurst, Ontario. Established in 1997 by artist EJ Lightman (b.1952), a former student of Whiten’s, the Tree Museum features installations by Canadian and international artists developed in situ with materials from this locale.  Danse was created by sandblasting images directly into the exposed surface of the Canadian Shield. It remains the only permanent outdoor work Whiten has produced to date.

The iconography of Danse includes the artist’s familiar motifs: the rose and the skull. The rose embraces notions of spiritual attainment, perfection, completion, and of mortal existence giving way to eternal life. Here, twelve roses are arranged in two constellations. The composition also includes four larger-than-life-size skeletal figures. Each plays a different musical instrument: a drum, a trumpet, a bagpipe, and a xylophone. Whiten’s figures are rendered after a series of miniature woodblock etchings by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/1498–1543) entitled The Dance of Death, c.1526. In each print, Death takes the form of a skeleton who indiscriminately snatches away souls from various walks of life: the rich and the poor, the pious and the irreverent.

Scaling the slope of this rocky terrain, we gradually uncover Whiten’s skeletons, each one beckoning us along to the next. Deftly articulated, their jubilant gestures are further animated by the shifting play of light and shadow across the etched surfaces and by the crisscrossing veins of the granite that re-inscribe their silhouettes.

Embracing these elemental conditions, Whiten’s imprints on the landscape echo spiritual practices extending back thousands of years, retracing the rituals behind the making of petroglyphs.  They are also reminiscent of fossilized forms embedded in the earth’s surface, punctuated by the lichen and mosses now nestled in their crevices. Here, we embody the experience of time. The transitory nature of human life is reinforced by the brevity of music symbolized by the instruments carried by Whiten’s skeletons, coupled with the image of an hourglass. This temporality is played out against the permanence of the shield and the imperceptible movements of geological time. The celestial configuration of roses sandblasted into the rock also underscores the cycle of seasons as well as the origins of life, reminding us that we, too, are made from “stardust.”

Danse is composed solely of Precambrian rock, the ancient geological core of North America. Stone symbolizes survival, immortality; as the “bones of the earth, the rocks remain both host and witness to the endless processes of regeneration.”  They become the living embodiment of the layers of consciousness, the vibrational elements that perpetually call us back to a primordial state of being, that “once upon a time.”