Michèle White’s work explores – often through sources in literature – manifestations of the unconscious or the invisible in the visible world. Deeply attached to physical practices in art and hand production, the history and meaning of materials and processes are central to the artist’s visual practice, research, and teaching.
A Professor of Drawing & Painting in the Faculty of Art at the Ontario College of Art & Design, 2010 marks her 28th year of teaching. In 2005 Professor White received the Price Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has also administrated at the program, faculty and senior management levels and led the Florence Off-Campus Program.
Michèle has participated in solo, group and collective exhibitions since 1975 in public and private galleries throughout the province, and is represented by David Kaye Gallery in Toronto. She has received Toronto, Ontario and Canada Council Grants; Materials Assistance, Explorations, Artists and the Workplace, Travel and Professional Development Grants; the RBC Painting Prize and two Elizabeth T. Greenshields Scholarships to study in Europe.
Art School Dismissed features a site-specific work, Primary Yellow, about the imaginary that arises out of reading. Closely related to a recent body of White’s work Yellow Wallpaper (based on the novella by Charlotte Perkins Gillman), Primary Yellow involves a two and three-dimensional pattern and image collaboration out of the teacher-student relationship. Amanda Clyne, Christofer Hutch, Nitasha McKnight, Erin Parton and Rebecca Simonetti, all graduates of the Thesis Program in Drawing & Painting at OCAD in which Michèle teaches, will colonize a classroom corner, windows and a wall in the production of a group creative experience. The resulting reading space provides permission for the imagination to expand from the page to the environment.