You are here

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky

Country:

City:

Categories:

Exhibition Type:

How many artists: 
1
Date: 
Friday, 31 January 2020 to Saturday, 7 March 2020

Calling to mind the space of a home, the sculptures in this exhibition restage the uncertainty and contradiction inherent within our physical and psychological interface with the close-at-hand. The works confuse the sense of what is surface with what is support, what is a singular object with what is many objects, and what is representation with what are the material traces of the process of making.

New free-standing shelf sculptures are part of a series of work that the artists consider all-armature sculptures. The artists extend and thicken the shelf armatures, in order to depict objects, such as plants, that appear to rest upon them, floating above negative spaces delineated by the shelf frames to be stand-ins for panes of glass. These works thus conflate what counts as part of the sculpture and what does not, what is material and what is just the air that surrounds it. 

These metamorphic fusions of shelves with such things as plants or spider webs recall the way interior spaces, embellished with plant and animal patterns, are often decorated to appear as if overtaken by nature.  The artists are interested in the way such a desire to give one’s world over to wildness and dissolution, including trippy states governed by magic, fantasy and play, emerges as the flipside of a total control of surface.

Upstairs, the artists present a series of watercolours in which brick walls are depicted in an echo of the flat surface of the paper. These walls are punctured with entrances to alleyways rendered in isomorphic perspective, suggestive of the streets that trail off in strange perspective found in the works of de Chirico. Graphically elaborate tags, articulating suggestive names such as Limmp, Lurker and Pleezer, are splayed along the deeply receding walls of the openings, as if they were words emerging from mouths. They conjure the presence of a world with its own rules and language that lies, somehow, further inside the fibres of the paper.

Artist ( Description ): 

Weppler and Mahovsky’s interdisciplinary practice is intimately tied to the joy, anxiety, history, and narrative potential of objects. Often exploiting the tension between specificity and ubiquity, their work engages the viewer in a playful game of surface recognition. In contrast, however, their varied processes of making utilize a slow effort of material production and accumulation.  Their works are simultaneously depictions of things and records of a process of making, and thus it is hard to isolate their representational cues from the literal qualities of their distressed, creased or slumped materials.  To the artists, the result is “three dimensional cartoons that remain firmly embedded in the world they flout”.

Telephone: 
4165043699
Venue ( Address ): 

137 Tecumseth Street

Toronto, Ontario

M6J 2H2

Other events from Susan Hobbs Gallery

view
Derek Sullivan: Field Works
04/18/2024 to 05/25/2024
view
Gareth Long: Delaware Abstract Corporation
01/18/2024 to 02/24/2024
view
Patrick Cruz: CANADA
11/30/2023 to 01/13/2024
view
Kevin Yates: No Room for Monsters
10/19/2023 to 11/25/2023

Pages

 

Related Shows This Week

view
Jen Okumura - 'Self Awareness and Love: All-Inclusive Works'
02/03/2024 to 03/30/2024
view
JUNE EDMONDS: Meditations on African Resilience
02/24/2024 to 04/13/2024
view
What Was Once Familiar: The Vision & Art Project's Tenth Anniversary Benefit Exhibition
03/20/2024 to 04/26/2024
view
LORI COZEN-GELLER ||| THE HUMAN CONDITION
10/18/2023 to 12/16/2024
view
Tomas Watson: Transitions
03/06/2024 to 04/13/2024
view
Artists on the Bowery Part 5: Berthot, Diao, Hammond, Nevelson, Quaytman, Yamaoka
03/14/2024 to 05/11/2024
view
Somebody's Cheering Somewhere
03/15/2024 to 05/10/2024
view
New Exhibition Opening: Taking Liberties, Jason Willaford
03/30/2024

Pages