Search Reach Release 2020

Whiten’s artistic explorations with glass as a medium have led to a body of work executed in coloured crushed glass, including Arisearose, 2018, Respite, 2019, Ground Rules, 2023 (first shown in Elemental: Fire, 2023), and Court, 2023 (created for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Search Reach Release forms part of this series.

A prayer carpet composed of recycled glass shards, Search Reach Release reveals a pattern with the inverted Tree of Life—an archetypal image referenced in other works by Whiten, including Magic Gestures: Lites and Incantations, 1981—reaching down from heaven, flanked by white wings. An otherworldly blue rose appears at its roots with an “all-seeing eye” and white clouds above. Coloured glass, especially cobalt-blue glass, is difficult to procure. For this piece, Whiten purchased glass items from eBay and restaurant suppliers, broke them up, and then applied a heavy acrylic gel medium to bind the shards.

The tradition of using cobalt-blue glass, handed down from generation to generation, came from the Kingdom of Kongo, where cobalt continues to be mined. In the African Diaspora, particularly in the southern United States, African Americans hung cobalt-blue glass bottles upside down on trees to entice and capture evil spirits.  Blue glass beads, bottles, and pottery shards, among other articles needed in the next life, have also been found on slave graves.

Cobalt-infused glass is associated with curative properties: it preserves the essence of its contents and keeps it pure and, given time, the contents stored inside also become stronger.  As such, it was often used for the storage of pharmaceuticals and perfume, which Whiten knew from his experience working for a pharmacist as a teenager. For example, Soir de Paris (Evening in Paris), a floral perfume by Bourjois for women launched in 1928, was sold in a signature blue glass bottle.

As a carpet, Search Reach Release references the making of textiles and the rhythmic gestures of weaving. Symbolically, the warp, the vertical yarn on a threaded loom, is the vertical plane of existence; it is the immutable, unchanging essence of all things, comparable to the light of the sun. By contrast, the weft, the horizontal yarn, is the horizontal plane; it is the contingent, temporal, human sphere and symbolizes the reflected light of the moon. The intersecting cross represents the union of opposites.

Carpets are also endowed with magical properties in various cultures: Prince Husain has a flying carpet in One Thousand and One Nights; Solomon has one in the Old Testament. They are believed to facilitate the instant transportation of the passenger to another destination, including heaven. Search Reach Release is a prayer carpet; while its undulating curves suggest motion, it speaks to prayer as a spiritual technology to aid in our passage to another dimension.

The presence of the prayer carpet connotes an act of supplication, a gesture common to other works by Whiten. Ram, 1987, comprises a long pole on wheels supporting a human skull. The aperture at the front of this battering ram holds a tiny mirror. To gaze into the aperture and see our reflection requires that we kneel down in a position of humility. Like Ram, Search Reach Release underscores the conditions of transformation. The act of kneeling down on crushed glass points not only to the act of supplication but to the pain and sacrifice necessary to attain revelation.