Cum Grano Salis
Super Tide, Mathew Borrett & Elaine Whittaker
Cum Grano Salis
Elaine Whittaker with participating artists Mathew Borrett, Teri Donovan, Tracy Gorman, Kelley Aitken, Kaz Ogino, Heidi Breier, Kat Honey, Kai Kan, Kim-Lee Kho, and Jim Nason
March 4 – 28, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 7, 2 – 5pm
The Red Head Gallery, Toronto
The Red Head Gallery is excited to exhibit Cum Grano Salis by member Elaine Whittaker.
“Cum grano salis” (Latin for “with a grain of salt”) is an expression of skepticism. In an era saturated with images, data, and competing truths, the potential for exaggeration and distortion is greater than ever. Doubt is integral to how we perceive and interpret the world today. We move continuously between trust and mistrust, truth and fabrication, constantly pausing to reassess what we have just seen, heard, or absorbed.
Fresh From the Lab 1, Teri Donovan
Cum Grano Salis invites viewers to enter a constellation of speculative worlds in which uncertainty is not an exception but a condition. Across installations, video, and mixed media artworks, Elaine Whittaker both curates and collaborates with ten artists to imagine what forms of life, survival, and coexistence might emerge on a rapidly changing planet. Drawing on depictions of climate change in speculative and science fiction, the artworks unfold through narrative, atmospheric, and embodied experiences. The changes are not a distant abstraction but something we now feel, inhabit, and negotiate.
Images (left to right, top to bottom): Trapunto, Tracy Gorman. The Three Body Problem Saga, Kaz Ogino. Mothership, Jim Nason. Transcenders, Kat Honey.
The exhibition is a story of three interwoven galaxies—distinct yet interconnected—fantasy and scientific inquiry converge. Viewers move between our Milky Way galaxy and two fantastical ones, encountering altered ecosystems and technologies. Adaptations blur the boundaries between the plausible and the imagined. Dystopian and utopia impulses intersect. This is what Margaret Atwood terms ‘ustopia’—a fragile balance where loss and possibility coexist, shaped by new forms of cooperation.
In placing climate change and planetary changes within speculative and fictional frameworks, Cum Grano Salis opens space for emotional, poetic, and critical engagement. The exhibition encourages viewers to consider how imagination, storytelling, and world-building might help reframe our understanding of environmental instability and change our relationship to our planet.
About the Artist
Elaine Whittaker is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, science, medicine, and ecology. She has created artworks for over twenty-five years about climate change, epidemics and pandemics as our environment becomes even more fragile in this time of emerging, and re-emerging, contagions. The artworks reflect on narratives of hope and elements of anxiety as found in popular culture, scientific research, and personal experience. More recently her artworks reference climate and planetary changes through the lens of utopian and dystopian speculative and science fiction. Whittaker creates mixed media installations and artworks that incorporate traditional and unconventional materials—paint, pigment, wax, clay, textiles, repurposed fibres, and mosquitoes, salt crystals, human/animal cells, and live microorganisms.
She has exhibited in art and science galleries and museums in North & South America, Mexico, Europe, China, South Korea, and Australia, including, among others, the Centre Pompidou (France), RIXC Centre for New Media Culture (Latvia), Ontario Science Centre (Toronto), The Museum (Kitchener), BioBat Art Space (US), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), MUSA Museum of Salt (Italy), Science Gallery London & Dublin (UK), Fudan University Science Gallery (China), Gwacheon National Science Museum (South Korea), Plug In Institute (Winnipeg), Yukon Arts Centre Gallery (Whitehorse), and McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton). Her artworks are featured in art, literary, and medical journals, and in books on BioArt and new media including Viral Behaviors: Viruses and Viral Phenomena Across Science, Technology & the Arts by Roberta Buiani (2024), and BioArt: Altered Realities by William Myers (2015). She has been an active member of the Red Head Gallery collective for over twenty years.
View past exhibitions by Elaine Whittaker.
The Red Head Gallery
401 Richmond St West, Suite 115
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
www.redheadgallery.org
info@redheadgallery.org
416 504 5654
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm
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