Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky

In response to the idea of “plasticity” our submitted artworks are two looped videos which were produced on the East Coast of Canada. These two videos reflect on the most valuable resource: water, as the ultimate plastic material, which changes its form, knows no boundries across space and time, and connects all living things.

In 2023, we ran collaborative workshops at Marshview Middle School and the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick, during which over 100 participants made single-line ink on paper drawings and reusable plastic clay relief sculptures based on the theme that water connects all things.

Returning to our Toronto studio, we photographed the drawings and combined them as a single video connecting the glyph-like images. We made casts of the participants’ sculptures in ice, then documented these casts as they melted into puddles of water. This footage was edited into a looped video in which each sculpture seems to rise like an apparition from an inky black sea, before melting into the next, suggesting both the beginning and end of the world.

Exhibiting either one, or both of these works projected, on either video monitor(s) or wall-mounted iPad(s), at the Viva space in Vancouver, our thought was that this piece would be fitting for ‘Plasticity’ in that it would connect two sides of a continent, where water plays a prominent role in both the geography and culture of these two places.