Artist Statement/ Biography

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky make sculptural still life, attenuated by an emphasis on process and materiality. Whether generated by laborious working methods, held together by propping or balancing, or constructed from ephemeral material, their works focus attention upon their coming into and out of existence. In them, traces of hand embossing and accumulated paint and plaster drips function as almost-frozen records of the passage of time. By posing their very real vulnerability, temporality and open-endedness as an ambiguously bracketed off ‘life’, the works attempt to picture the world in which they are happily embedded. This self-picturing, wrapped up as it is with a necessarily exaggerated mimicry, is realized as a kind of earthy comedy.

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Rhonda Weppler (born in Winnipeg) and Trevor Mahovsky (born in Calgary) are New York- and Toronto-based artists who have worked collaboratively since 2004. Both artists have MFA degrees from the University of British Columbia, where they met in 1996. Their work has been shown extensively throughout Canada, and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including LABoral (Gijon), Dos de Mayo (Madrid), the Power Plant (Toronto), Tokyo Wonder Site, and loop-raum (Berlin). Mahovsky has written for catalogues and journals such as Artforum and Canadian Art. Their work is represented in public collections including Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Canada.