This month's essay was written by Curator DeWitt Cheng, for Whitaker's solo exhibit at Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame, California. The show is up until August 23, so do come by and see his brilliant staging.
The Peninsula Museum of Art is pleased to announce a solo show of the digital artwork of Corinne Whitaker of Foster City. Whitaker is a pioneer in digital art, having moved from photography into the brand new field of computer art (CAD, Computer-Assisted Design) in 1981. She is well known to the digital art community as the creator of dazzling poetic, surreal works, both in 2D and 3D: in 2D her complex, hallucinatory composites are printed on large-format aluminum panels, in general. This show, comprising nearly thirty pieces, will feature, in addition, three new works printed on brass panels and three works employing lenticular printing of 3D models, with the appearance varying - or rather morphing from one angle to another - as the viewer changes position. Whitaker is also the publisher of nine books of images and poetry, and the creator of a newsletter, The Digital Giraffe (www.giraffe.com), now in its twenty-first year.
PMA is fortunate to have such a wealth of artistic talent on the San Francisco Peninsula. With the influence of Silicon Valley so predominant these days, we are proud to be exhibiting an artist of such eminence as Corinne Whitaker, who employs up-to-the-minute technology to develop her imaginative, surreal, and sometimes satirical visions in ways impossible to achieve with traditional media. Despite her fascination with and mastery of digital magic, she is a discerning social critic who uses technology to questions its effects on human society. In addition, she brings a mature and feminist perspective to a discipline generally considered the domain of techie whiz-kid geeks with more circumscribed worldviews. She questions face-recognition technology, the possible misuses of cell-phone GPS, and the viability of democracy in a surveillance state. Recently she reflected in The Digital Giraffe, "These shredded forms (in my new work) reflect the discomfort that I sense around us and around the world. Humans seem to be uneasy everywhere."
Corinne Whitaker's witty, mind-bending solo show No Rules, (which nicely characterizes her independent, individualistic vision) makes a fitting pendant to a group show of digital sculpture, curated by Hanna Regev, 3D printing technologies: The Radical Shift.
c. Corinne Whitaker 2015