New Exhibition by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky 🔊

January 13–May 5, 2024
Vernissage, January 13 at 2pm
Curator: Lucy MacDonald

Artists Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky 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 exhibition at the Owens features two works: the new video installation Solaris, and a special Sackville presentation of the Pom-Pom Jam Mobile Hub.

Solaris originates in a series of collaborative workshops the artists gave at Marshview Middle School and the Owens Art Gallery in 2023. Participants made single-line drawings, small relief sculptures, and evocative soundscapes exploring the ways water connects all living things. The artists then cast the resulting sculptures in ice, filming each one as it melted into a puddle of water. Through this process of transformation, the sculptures appear to rise like monumental icebergs from the sea only to melt again, suggesting both the beginning and the end of the world.

The Pom-Pom Jam Mobile Hub uses craft yarn sourced on eBay. Commonly made using leftover yarn, pom-poms are flourishes requiring no special skills, tools, or financial means. Each pom-pom bin in the Hub contains a pom-pom making kit with distinct colour pallets of yarn that are identified by their source location. Echoing abandoned craft projects, the yarn is taken up anew by participants, as an internet-enabled collaboration across space and time.