RHONDA WEPPLER AND TREVOR MAHOVSKY
Rhonda Weppler
Trevor Mahovsky
Central Gallery
March 30 to May 25, 2008
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky are a Vancouver-based artist-duo, and among the most exciting young artists to emerge in Canada in the last decade. Although they have been working together since only 2004, they have already exhibited their work extensively across the country and internationally, in Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Montreal, Nagoya, Berlin, Tokyo, Portland, and elsewhere. Sculptors Weppler and Mahovsky are known for the playful and unsettling ways they transform everyday objects, such as styrene coffee cups, tin cans, cars, pop bottles, and other hallmarks of the everyday. Their work, conflicted in its relationship to a world of things, draws from both minimalist and Pop histories, while displaying a distinctly contemporary critical conceptualism.
In their exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery, Weppler and Mahovsky present a new body of work called Clutter Sculptures, which is decidedly more “baroque” than their earlier, clean-lined Stacked Objects. Everyday items, such as bricks, bottles, and tires, are formed out of wire armatures, which are then slathered in plaster and enamelled. The sculptures appear to be drenched in glossy icing and thrown together into haphazard, candy-coloured jumbles. In the words of Globe and Mail reviewer Gary Michael Dault, these sculptures “both attract (they are bright and toy-like) and repel (they are glandular-looking, as if they had been secreted rather than constructed).”
Along with the Clutter Sculptures, Weppler and Mahovsky present four large “collapsing” sculptures of expensive status objects: two tinfoil casts of a vintage car and two black paper casts of a hearse. To make the car sculptures, the artists use sheets of regular tinfoil glued together to form large sheets, which are then wrapped carefully around a real car. The tinfoil “mould” is lifted off, and transported to the gallery, where, over the course of the exhibition, it slowly collapses under its own weight. The model for the car sculpture is a vintage car belonging to a Kamloops resident.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with an essay by local poet Susan Buis and an interview with the artists by KAG curator, Jen Budney.
Generously sponsored by Pollard Banknote Limited, 98.3 CIFM, Off-Centre Magazine
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky
Skull and Bottle, 2007
polymerised gypsum and epoxy on metal and foam armature, enamel paint
Collection of the Kamloops Art Gallery, Purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts
Photo: Kamloops Art Gallery
