Rhonda Weppler
San Francisco, CA
Residency: March-April 2017
Project Description
During my time at Sculpture Space I was able to work on a series of wall mounted and floor sculptures that were later completed in collaboration with artist Trevor Mahovsky. I greatly appreciated the access to space, time and technical help including learning to weld. All the work that was made was shown in September and October 2017 at Susan Hobbs gallery in Toronto. The following is an excerpt from the press release for that exhibition:
Like ideas, we usually don’t find objects alone. Rather, we encounter them in tenuous conversation. An exchange that begins relationally—with other objects in proximity: assorted papers held together by a bulldog clip; a lamp atop a sagging table; flowers in a vase; piles of clothes on the floor. These scenarios are driven as much by randomness as intention.
Weppler and Mahovsky’s first exhibition with the gallery, The Guest’s Shadow, presents this rhetoric of objects as sculpture. The title, alluding to the domestic spaces suggested by the works in the exhibit, was found in a translation of a Matsuo Basho haiku, in which it is not clear if the speaker is seeing his own shadow, that of a guest, or is simply hallucinating. Similarly, the sculptures point to that sense that our experience of the world, even of that which is close-by and familiar, can unfold in uncertain and contradictory ways, like the poem’s example of the concrete world dissolving into shadow, a shadow that in turn becomes as palpable as anything else in the room. As theatrical tableaux, the sculptures often appear frozen in time or suspended mid-disintegration; they are the performers of dramatic scenes, each a hyperbole of the principle that the world is flux. By adopting the posture of still life and trompe l’oeil techniques, the push and pull of these works follows the conflation of representational and literal states. On the one hand, through suggesting narrative scenarios, the work alludes to the ease in which we can project agency onto objects; on the other, the works’ physical characteristics—which range from brutally material to delicate―assert their particular presence. There are limits to what the material can do and what it can represent, and it is through mimicry and surrogacy that these properties of the sculptures come to the fore. Literally, the material is what it is. Thus, these ostensibly narrative sculptures are equally records of their own making and passage through the world.
About the Artist
Rhonda Weppler was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1972, and currently lives in New York City. In 2016 she was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Branscombe House, Richmond, British Columbia, where she focused on community collaborative projects. She received her MFA degree from the University of British Columbia in 1999. Her work, both solo and collaborative with Trevor Mahovsky, has been exhibitied in galleries and museums institutions internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Vancouver Art Gallery, LABoral in Gijon, Dos de Mayo in Madrid, the Power Plant in Toronto, Musée d’art Contemporain in Montreal, Tokyo Wonder Site, loop-raum in Berlin, Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, and COCA in Seattle. Her work is represented in public collections including the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal and the National Gallery of Canada.