Event Info
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky : Carpet World:
January 11 - 31, 2009
Since 2004, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky have pr...
Event Description
January 11 - 31, 2009
Since 2004, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky have produced a body of work ranging from Thirty Foot Yawl (collapsible) - a fragile, hollow sailboat built of veneer - to foil casts of automobiles and intimately scaled sculptures of mundane objects such as coffee cups. Their sculptures are surrogates for the objects that inhabit the background of the world, taking as their subject the pleasures and anxieties wrought from this field. They are interested in the way a culture of things flittingly attains meaning and cohesion, and their works are characterized by a shifting sense of material culture as substance, image and language.
The installation Carpet World was made specifically for the Ministry of Casual Living, transforming the small gallery into a storage space filled with sculptural detritus such as bottles, boxes, out of season decorations and an old sign. Though these objects are roughly made of slathered, dripping plaster and paint, they attempt to move beyond this literalness, however crudely, into the representation of transparency, weightlessness, and the passage of time. Viewed from the street and through the Ministry's store-front window, Carpet World congeals into a kind of thick, frozen picture.
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky are Vancouver-based artists who have worked collaboratively since 2004. Born in Winnipeg and Calgary, respectively, both artists have MFA degrees from UBC, where they met in 1996. Solo exhibits include: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery, and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). They have participated in group shows at the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Alberta, Tokyo Wonder Site, and loop-raum (Berlin). Weppler's work has also been exhibited at the Palazzo delle Papesse (Siena), and COCA (Seattle), while Mahovsky's work has been shown at the Queens Museum of Art and Vancouver Art Gallery. Mahovsky has written for journals including Artforum and Canadian Art. In 2000, Mahovsky was a resident at apexart in New York, while in 2007 Weppler completed an ISCP residency in New York. Their work is represented in public collections including the Musee d'art Contemporain de Montreal and the National Gallery of Canada.
Sun. January 11th 2009
In-Person Event
