MacLaren Art Centre
Barrie, Ontario
December 4, 2014—
March 8, 2015

To say we live in a society utterly devoted to the superficial, to the surfaces of things, certainly isn’t the most profound thing one might utter about us. It’s pretty self-evident, all in all. But “self-evident” doesn’t necessarily mean uninteresting. The superficial, the surfaces of things, is, after all, what we encounter when we set forth to explore our world, and often we simply opt not to look any further, settling for whatever meaning we might extract or conjure forth that is utterly contingent upon the immediacy of surface appeal.

In a sense that’s what Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky have done in Veneers. They have assembled together a number of sculptural works in an exhibition that is, in many ways, about the contingency of the world, about how our understanding of our place within it is absolutely shaped by the kinds of surfaces we encounter. And what we seem to encounter, here, is a rickety, rather dishevelled version of the world, a world but one tiny step away from entirely collapsing in upon itself – and in some instances, already has.

What hasn’t quite succumbed to disintegration is Bad Neighbour (all works are 2014). It’s a fence – sort of. Three upright posts supporting a backyard barrier made of alternating board construction. Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, except that Wepper and Mahovsky have introduced real absences and their mending. One side

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