Together Again
Thierry Delva & Mark Whidden
March 23 — April 20, 2025
open 12-6pm Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, or by appointment
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 22nd at 2pm
Meet the Artist, Mark Whidden: during gallery hours on March 23rd and 29th, April 6th and 13th
In the early 1980s, Thierry Delva and Mark Whidden were BFA students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It is when and where they met. Both were mainly drawn to Sculpture and Art History. They would not exhibit together until 1994 when their work appeared in a group show officially titled Sculpture Expo ’94 but fondly remembered as The Mall Show sponsored by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery.
Delva/Whidden, also referred to as Together Again, is the first time the artists have shown their work together in the same space since 1994. There is no real curatorial structure here other than the fact that the artists are contemporaries and have their philosophies rooted in NSCAD’s conceptual underpinnings. While their methods and approaches differ, their art does intertwine.
Thierry Delva was born and raised near Ghent in the heart of East Flanders, Belgium. In 1977 he immigrated to Canada. He first settled in Brandon, Manitoba and moved to Halifax in 1982 to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Delva received both his BFA Degree (1985) and MFA Degree (1993) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. In between degrees, he trained as a restoration stone mason and in 1990 he received his journeman’s papers from the Nova Scotia Department of Advanced Education. He is an elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts (RCA).
Delva’s work has been shown widely both nationally and internationally. Some examples include: the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the National Gallery of Canada, Museum London, Art Gallery of Windsor, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, S.L. Simpson Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Real Art Ways (Hartford), Joseloff Gallery (Hartford), Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach), Memling Museum (Bruges, Belgium). Additionally, he has been the recipient of several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia. He has work in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Bank of Nova Scotia, the University of Lethbridge, Dalhousie Art Gallery.
About his art practice and Together Again, Mark Whidden remarks:
My work is driven by the need to make things. I have a wide array of skills that I have honed over the years, from furniture restoration, finish reproduction (the creation of finishes which appear old) complicated construction, carving etc. I use these skills as a means of creating ideas as I work and filter ideas through my dissociative and attention deficient mind. My work is personal and somewhat autobiographical. I am a natural born storyteller and I tend to craft a narrative in all I do, if only as a means of understanding the mysterious process of living and creating. The works on display tell a story of my relation to the work I do to make money and the work I make to make connections.
In the pieces I have created in the show at Hermes, I have carved body parts, and a body, out of white oak, mahogany, pine and walnut. I have used some of the ideas of Antonin Artaud as a reference and borrow Artaud’s phrase “the body without organs” to describe my notion of the virtual dimension of the body and, ultimately, the basic substratum of reality.
The Dead Bullfighter uses construction, image and historic allusions in the production of the piece, which suggest the action of the mortal nature of the ring, the “dance” where death is a certain outcome, bull or man or both. The rat in this piece is an embodiment of Manet’s dead toreador, but where that spanish maverick is a romantic, disconsolate image of human bravery and ultimate failure, the rat is commonplace, a creature seen lying in the streets and hurled in the garbage. But the rat is of nature while humans have gone beyond nature. In fantasy angels await us in eternal bliss where in reality, from what I’ve seen on TV at least, it is a cold stainless steel drawer. But the rat will be rejoined to nature. The birds will eat its flesh and return its remains to the ground through their defecations. It’s heart will feed worms. When we are gone the rats will live on.
As one who reads and is fascinated by history and art history, I find myself quoting it often. Thus, the piece Workers Monument to Endless Work is a reference both to Brancusi’s Endless Column and Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. It was said of Artaud, his admiration for Balinese dance, and can be said of me and my art historical references, “Although he misunderstood much of what he saw, it influenced his ideas...” Within the column of sawhorses is a hand carved in mahogany. It ends past the wrist where the bones can be seen protruding from the skin. As a worker in the field of construction this is a fetishistic embodiment of my fears of disembodiment.
The Walking Dead is a white oak reproduction of what I assume could be my own femur based on my highly unscientific measurements. As I find myself in need of a hip replacement, I have tried to move the medical process forward by making a part which I hope can be of assistance to the health professionals. The bone is displayed on a base skinned with high gloss white arborite, a material both fitting to a medical environment but also one I have used extensively as a builder of kitchens.
Thierry Delva, my co-exhibitor in the showing of these works, says his work is about death. Duck decoys that invite the killing of living ducks, flashlights whose light is fading and about to die. My works are about living with death, be that a dead rat seen lying on the ground or the parts of the body which fail us on our way to the grave.
Mark Whidden is a woodworker and maker of things who resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
He regularly works in the field of sculpture and has been exhibiting since 1983. His film A Flash In The Pan won an alternate award in the St John Film festival in 2018. He has had his writings published in Canadian publications including C Magazine and Arts Atlantic. A recipient of a Canada Council travel grant, he once travelled to Los Angeles with a stopover in Chicago.
He has worked extensively in film and ran a cabinetry and construction business for 25 years. He is the wood shop technician at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where he also teaches woodworking and sculpture.
He is the father of 2 children, 2 cats and has been known to house chickens.