Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky: Edelweiss
Esker Foundation
January 20 - April 28
Edelweiss is an immersive and evolving exhibition that invites audiences into a dream-like reflection on memory, home, and the passage of time. As a permutation of Weppler and Mahovsky’s Twilight, a series of life-scale mock antique and thrift stores stocked with handmade lanterns assembled from photographs of locally collected objects, this installation continues the artists’ investigation of mimicry, alternative economies, communities, and relationships that can form around familiar objects, and the flow of these objects through our lives.
As visitors step into the dimmed gallery space, they are invited into an impossibly black shed—a structure that stands in sharp contrast to the luminous objects housed within it. Edelweiss begins with a single lantern emerging from the darkness. Over the course of the exhibition, the shed will gradually fill with more; its shadowy interior slowly illuminated by an ethereal, ever-changing glow. Each lantern—crafted by the artists using traditional lantern materials of mulberry paper, wax, and wire—is a sculpture of an object selected from Trevor Mahovsky’s childhood home on Calgary’s Edelweiss Road. By depicting the objects in encaustic renderings, which are then transformed into sculptural facsimiles, the lanterns operate as a kind of still life, mimicking and representing everyday belongings and acting, collectively, as a kind of portrait of a home. However, through their handmade, crafted form and resulting flawed likeness, they also become symbolic of personal familial and historic ties, with each object holding its own veiled story and connection to the past—and the present.
Inspired by a high school friend’s brief attempt to move from his parents’ house into their garage, the inherited home of Edelweiss suggests a struggle to break free of the burdens associated with these objects, as much as an attempt to preserve the world they represent. However, these objects are not just remnants of a personal narrative; but are also symbols of the fragile spaces that “homes” represent, especially as they stand on the cusp of radical transition and possible loss—they are a material recognition of the inevitable changes that time brings.
As the lanterns accumulate, the exhibition mirrors the ever-changing landscape of our memories and the objects we associate with them; it is an invitation to contemplate our own connections to the past and the objects that anchor us to our histories.
The exhibition will conclude with a lantern festival-style event, to which the public is invited. The lanterns will be given to those who attend and will disperse into the world to find new homes, continuing their journey in the flow of time.
BIOGRAPHY
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, based in New York and Toronto respectively, have worked collaboratively since 2004. Their work has increasingly incorporated communal aspects of making, such as DIY tutorial videos and virtual crafting bees, in the context of economies of appropriation, trade, and the gift. Their recent video project Crafts Abyss was hosted by the Museum of Arts & Design, New York. Other exhibitions since 2022 include a major temporary public installation for OpenArt, Orebro; and solo exhibitions at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center at Governors Island, New York; and the Owens Art Gallery, Sackville. Their work is in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Musee d’art Contemporain de Montreal. They were awarded the 2014 Glenfiddich Prize and were the 2022 L.L. Odette Sculptors in Residence at York University, Toronto.
Open: Wed - Fri: 11:00 - 18:00, Sat & Sun: 12:00 - 17:00
Access: Location is wheelchair accessible. Exhibition is child friendly.
For more information see eskerfoundation.com
Esker Foundation, 4th floor, 1011 9th Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0H7