Artists Curator Themes |
Home » Exhibitions » Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky
Return to search results Rhonda Weppler & Trevor MahovskyRhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky 1994 Volkswagen Golf 1, 2 & 3 2007 MSVU Installation aluminum foil, glue Courtesy of the artists Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky are collaborative artists from Vancouver. Since 2004 they have produced a body of work ranging from Thirty Foot Yawl (collapsible) —a fragile, hollow sailboat built of veneer — to more intimately scaled sculptures of coffee cups, sugar cubes and other mundane things. Many of their sculptures take shape via indexical processes, having been cast directly from objects without intermediate moulds. As the artists describe them, "These works, examples of sculptural still life at 1:1 scale, proceed from the idea of sculpture as a special category of object claiming the contradictory status of ’thing but not a thing’, based upon a complex surrogacy for objects more commonly thought to be ’of the world’. " In all of their works, an emphasis on materiality and process confronts the iconic appeal of familiar shapes. MSVU Art Gallery will be exhibiting three aluminum foil casts of a Volkswagen Golf with related sculptures and photographs. The car was cast on campus outside the gallery, then reassembled in the exhibition space on an armature that was subsequently removed. The resulting hollow sculptures collapse over time, becoming less and less recognizable. Combining a slide into formlessness with unavoidable pathos, these foiled structures are predestined to conform to the familiar type of the "wreck". The VW Golfs belong to a series of foil casts, all made through an elaborate embossing process, that includes SUVs, luxury and midrange sedans, subcompacts, a half-ton truck and a Hummer H2. Exhibition Images Click on an image to enlarge it. |