Sunday Scene with Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky

A thought-provoking Sunday Scene with artists Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, who will examine the creative practice of Toronto-based artist Jen Aitken, discussing her show at The Power Plant, The Same Thing Looks Different

About the Speakers

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 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.

About The Same Thing Looks Different

Jen Aitken is a Toronto-based artist whose first major institutional presentation features both new commissions and a selection of existing concrete sculptures. Primarily working in sculpture, Aitken’s practice considers how we relate to space, form, and material as we move through our urban environment. Common building materials—concrete, wood, and fibreglass—are formed into unexpected and ambiguous configurations that engage with the viewer’s body and interact with the gallery’s architecture. Aitken will also debut her first video installation, animating the geometric lexicon of her sculptures into an immersive prelude to the exhibition.