Weppler & Mahovsky, Ragged Yellow Net
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky of Vancouver create sculptures that revel in entropy and collapse. (An earlier piece consisted of a pair of sagging cars fashioned from tin foil.) Like Luanne Martineau, whose unruly boiled-wool sculptures are also in this show, these two recall such precursors as R. Crumb, Claes Oldenburg, Mad magazine and Philip Guston, drawing on the democratic, mad-cap energy of classic cartooning. Here, it is not clear what the yellow net refers to, but one can think of the work as a kind of semi-decomposing modernist grid ( à la Mondrian) supporting blobs of paint, a flying rotary telephone, a cane (Chaplin's ghost?), a battered brick and a length of chain that seems to defy gravity by leaping into the air. All of these elements are crafted from a kind of rubbery matter drenched in gooey paint. Their radical dishevelment engages our senses, igniting our messier urges.