NADA New York 2025

Spatiotemporal possibilities pervade the work of Toronto-based artist Jacob Robert Whibley. Collected over a span of nearly two decades, the materials used in his collages chronicle Whibley’s own existence through the ‘stuff’ he has accumulated, beginning with a paper archive salvaged from a film prop studio in the early 2000s. Since then, he has continued to add to and draw from this archive, while also absorbing and reverently redeploying his own cut offs – the remnants, scraps, and negative spaces born from his collage process. In this way, Whibley treats space and time as malleable substances to shape, carve, manipulate, and reconfigure through what can be described as a dancerly approach to art making. The ground for Whibley’s collages consist mostly of materials that shape or store space and time: photo album backings stripped bare, waterlogged maps, pages shorn from books, and flimsy (yet miraculously unripped) record sleeves. Whibley emphasizes the lived histories of these materials over their content by featuring their versos replete with stains, creases, and scotch-taped seams. Far from neutral voids, each weathered base lends an atmosphere to the composition; each one is an agent in the act.