John Whitten is a multidisciplinary artist who uses drawing and digital tools to examine the relationship between technology, materiality, and human experience. His artwork mines the philosophical significance of what it means to wander through a sea of signals and noise that envelops our world. Through labor-intensive graphite drawings of half-toned photographic images, he plays with the breakdown of pixelated pictorial space to emphasize the viewer's in-person experience with material and light, and to critically engage digital media’s impact on our contemporary culture, creative practices, and lived experiences. These works reference mechanical processes, sacrificing their efficiency while highlighting their aesthetics, in order to mine digital media's trace on our lives.
Naturally inclined towards representational imagery, Whitten often challenges his desire to depict the knowable by exploring abstraction as a system for engaging with the unknown. To do so, he uses methods that involve digital processes while combining chance, intuition, and structure. This approach allows him to embrace doubt, pay homage to subtle shifts in perspective, and offer a meditative method for mapping both personal and communal experience. It also enables him to construct a space where signals and noise can be explored in all their complexity, as positive and negative, signifier and obstruction, sacred and profane. Through these explorations, Whitten invites viewers to meditate on attention and time, and to consider the deeper philosophical significance of our relationship with technology and the material world.
In addition to his solo work, he is deeply committed to collaboration and community engagement. His collaborative projects allow him to expand his use of materials, aesthetics, and objects in unexpected and exciting ways. For example, he has created videos that are looped on raspberry-pi-powered screens inside hand-built clay sculptures, combining technology with raw materials to create unexpected moments of beauty and reflection. He has also produced animated photo-microscopic images of objects created during pseudo-mystical group performances, examining the meaning embedded in materials, rituals, and communal experience.
Whitten co-founded the Carnation Contemporary and Well Well Projects galleries with the intention of providing representation for underrepresented artists and enriching the local arts community in the Oregon Center for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon. He also co-directs Thunderstruck, a creative collective that began as a trip among friends in 2018 and has since grown into a cross-disciplinary project that investigates the critical legacy of the 1970s Land Art movement for contemporary culture and environmental activism. Through exhibitions and publications inspired by trips to land art sites and other non-art locations in the American West, the collective seeks to rethink the Land Art movement and respond to human intervention in the landscape. As a group of multidisciplinary artists and writers, they explore how their experience of these sites is altered and enriched by experiencing them communally.
Recent solo exhibitions have included shows at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art and Eastern Oregon University’s Nightingale Gallery. Other collaborative exhibitions and projects include showing at NARS in New York City, NY; Outback Arthouse in Los Angeles, CA; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in Korea; Oregon Center for Contemporary Art and Melanie Flood Projects in Portland, OR. Recent awards include a Project Grant from the Regional Art and Culture Council, a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission, a Faculty Research Award from Oregon State University, a residency with Signal Fire funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and a residency at Caldera funded by the Ford Family Foundation. He earned his MFA from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon and his BFA from Watkins College of Art in Nashville, Tennessee. He was represented by Charles Hartman Fine Art for six years until the gallery closed in 2022. He is a Full-time Instructor of Digital Art, Experimental Video, and Advanced Drawing at Oregon State University.