Corinne Whitaker
Bio:
Corinne Whitaker, aka the Digital Giraffe, has been acclaimed for over thirty years as one of the pioneering artists in the field of digital imaging, and more recently in the new field of digital sculpture. She has exhibited
both nationally and internationally in over 80 solo and 200 group exhibitions, including a large solo exhibit entitled “Corinne Whitaker dot Uncom” at the San Bernardino County Museum. Her work has been published in over 100 magazines, books, catalogs, media and newspapers, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She presented the first digital fine art exhibition in India and has shown work in Thailand,
Germany, England, Japan , Russia, China, and Italy. She has also been interviewed on live simulcast on London TV and the Internet. She has lectured extensively on the radical new vocabulary offered by the computer, including “Look Ma. No Paintbrush!” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2007 Whitaker was honored with an invitation to
exhibit at Art Biennale in Florence, Italy. In January, 2010 she will be the featured artist for the National Women's Caucus for Art website.
Whitaker is one of the featured artists in the CD ROM and book, “Women Artists of the American West”, and was the keynote speaker at the California Art Educators’ Association Conference. Her work has won over 30 awards, including “Best in CyberArt” and two Golden Web Awards as well as an Artist’s Fellowship Award from the City of Pasadena. Her work
is also featured in the new books, “Art of the Digital Age” and “International Contemporary Artists”.
Whitaker’s award-winning Digital Giraffe online journal (www.giraffe.com),
now in its seventeenth year of continuous web publication, receives roughly one million hits annually and has been visited by 152 nations. It presents a changing exhibit of digital sculpture, sculptural renderings, and paintings along with features, critiques and articles, most of them archived online for the free use of scholars, curators, academics and critics.
Whitaker has been actively involved in the art community. For ten years she ran the Digital Giraffe gallery in Carmel, California. She has been a Board Member of the Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the
Carmel Gallery Alliance. She founded and curated the “Sculpture Withindoors” exhibit at the Carmel Art Festival. She is represented on the
West Coast by the Paul Mahder Gallery in San Francisco.
Whitaker lives and works in Palo Alto, where she maintains a studio open to the public by appointment (650-330-0871).
Palo Alto, California www.giraffe.com
All images are unique luminescent digital paintings on plexi, measuring 24” x 24”.
The works refer to distortions of the human form, sometimes by actions of one human against another, or one group against another; sometimes by the injustices perpetrated by the very institutions that are supposed to serve us. Whether medical and pharmaceutical institutions, or religious and political groups, by soldiers forced to kill against their will, by researchers threatened with loss of jobs or worse – whatever the cause, it is only humans that exterminate their own with such efficiency. Have you ever heard of a horse putting other horses into ovens at Dachau? Whom are we plucking today?
“Plucking Chickens”
You have a rare genetic disease. You will soon die. (That was 22 years ago.) Your
Parents were first cousins. The wise men told them to marry.
Pluck chickens every Friday night.
I am not diseased. I was simply in such a rush to be born that I left an enzyme behind.
We will infuse, implant, puncture and re-engineer. Big Medicine has the tools.
Big Pharma sets the rules.
I am not your pincushion. I may be a mystery to you,
but so is the smell of a Pterodactyl and the height of a hug.
We have passed the examinations, taken the oath, followed the gospel of Saint
Hippocrates. We are anointed with the halo of officialdom.
I will not measure my life in doses. I will measure my days in hugs and my hours in joy.
You go pluck chickens.
-Corinne Whitaker 2011-
