Edelweiss an “Illuminating Experience”

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Installation view of the exhibition “Edelweiss” by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, at Esker Foundation (photo by Blaine Campbell)

The installation Edelweiss comprises an inky black, barely lit gallery, with a full-size clapboard shed that visitors may trepidatiously circumnavigate and enter. 

Sculptural, spartan, eerily aglow, the exhibition is on view at Esker Foundation until April 28. It may not suggest abstract portraiture, yet we do not always immediately grasp what is unfolding. 

And so it is with this illuminating experience.

Created by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, Edelweiss continues the long-time art-making duo’s commitment to appropriating or mimetically mining everyday objects, recalibrating them with a compelling allure.

In this instance, we find the shed being gradually filled during the course of the exhibition with paper and wax replica glowing lanterns, inspired by chattels at Mahovsky’s parents’ house. Each iteration literally and metaphorically sheds light on visitors, who gingerly feel their way around the space.

Notions of light as life and darkness as foreboding, or light as good and dark as devilish, run throughout this highly experiential, chiaroscuro encounter.

What might we find lurking in the dark? What long-forgotten items await rediscovery at the back of your closet, garage, attic, crawlspace, storage locker or shed? And are these objects simply clutter, the product of lapsed spring-cleaning efforts, or vessels for memory and comfort?

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Installation detail of the exhibition “Edelweiss” by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, at Esker Foundation (photo by Blaine Campbell)

In an age of tiny houses, and an era when “stuff” is now widely regarded as counter-productive to ecological sustainability, we are reminded how far art and society have come from the days when western painterly portraiture measured status and wealth through the attire and trappings depicted in the sitter’s picture plane. 

This being the case, what critical value can we inherit from Weppler and Mahovsky’s endeavours?

As a word, edelweiss has many connotations. The project’s genesis is the street name where Mahovsky’s early family home was located. For others, edelweiss will have different connotations, perhaps love, nature and escape, a mountain flower, for instance, or the lyrical Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the Sound of Music. More literally, the English translation of edel and weiss from German, is noble and white.

A darker subtext (as referenced in the book Edelweiss – Reine des Fleurs) reveals the flower was the favourite bloom of Hitler and also a symbol for his force’s alpine unit. This is absolutely no suggestion that Weppler and Mahovsky are trading in such currency, but when considering that language is power, it becomes important to contemplate related symbols.

The symbology in the Esker exhibition, Edelweiss, may be considered as a system of placeholders for establishing connections between our past and present. Handmade renderings of everyday objects are bathed gently by light from within, a soulful illumination of what we may hold near and dear. Added to this is the evocative manner in which Weppler and Mahovsky have displayed their wares, appearing as spectral beacons set amidst a sea of darkness. Navigating Edelweiss brings you closer to other people, heightening kinaesthetic and vestibular feelings, a spatial massage.

In this sense, Edelweiss is on par with other sensory installations such as Absalon’s Cellules, Yayoi Kusama’s re-orienting light rooms, or Tracey Emin’s tent Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With. The latter is a germane marker in that Emin’s tenting and Edelweiss simultaneously connote both presence and absence. I was fortunate to spend time in the former, before it was collected by Charles Saatchi, then sadly destroyed in one of this century’s greatest artwork fires; it invoked personal relationships and what it means to be attached. The latter asks us to consider how we either hold on to or let go of material culture and memories.

Returning to Edelweiss and with one’s vision compromised, hearing becomes more acute. Listening to others also experiencing the installation says it all: 

“Where are we?”

“Are you ok?”

“Less is more.” 

“I’m beginning to see a little bit better.” 

And pithily: “It’s like the funeral of my old self.” 

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Cake Slice Lantern Workshop participants, led by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, display their creations in the exhibition “Edelweiss” at Esker Foundation, January 2024 (photo courtesy of Esker Foundation)

A series of workshops is running in tandem with the installation. Some are geared toward families to make take-home illuminated lamps, and others for attendees to make lanterns to appear in the future, in Weppler and Mahovsky’s allied Museum of Lost Things. Notably, the artist-made lanterns from Edelweiss will be gifted to audience members at the end of the show.

When the audience both becomes and reveals — and retains – the content, you know it is art of consequence. ■

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky: Edelweiss is on view now at Esker Foundation in Calgary, Alta., until April 28.

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