The Closer Together Things Are
At University of Waterloo Art GalleryÂ
September 14–October 28, 2017
By Stephanie Vegh
A useful way to decipher the intent behind The Closer Together Things Are is to begin with two sculptural works by Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky, holding the  centre of the University of Waterloo Art Gallery as though set to this very purpose.  Each creates the impression of physically significant weight – a ramshackle wooden wall seemingly supporting itself through its own clumsy mass, flanked by an opulent train of silver artifacts that cuts the room at a defiant diagonal stroke.
The Closer Together Things Are. University of Waterloo Art Gallery. Installation view. Photo by Stephanie Vegh
Closer scrutiny of both works reveals that each is a paper-thin simulation. The abundance of silver goods, ranging from precious antiques to pocket change and pencil sharpeners, are hollow cast from a single long piece of aluminum foil. The wooden construct is another clever fake, pieced together from remnants of wood veneer. Though seemingly less fragile than that tremulous skin of foil, this wall visibly sags beneath the weight of its forgery, exposing seams in its making that bulge with hollow potential.
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, Music of Chance 4 (detail), 2017. Photo by Stephanie Vegh
These two sculptures train the eye to slow down, to question all other encounters with a care that is too often lacking in the contemporary gaze. Chris Kline’s three large canvases reveal secretive acts of minimalism that call for this same mode of slower scrutiny, bearing ghostly grids that could be the cast shadows of their stretchers, or painstakingly painted illusions thereof: neither squinting eye nor tilting head resolves the question entirely. Taking a few frustrated steps back, curiosity dissolves in an unexpected impression of light and space – surface, in this case, gives way to unexpected depth.
Roula Partheniou, Twofold, 2016. Photo by Stephanie Vegh
Such tricks of light and space have the capacity to bend the eye towards other ways of seeing. The reflected double is spun from this same cloth, playing out in Roula Partheniou’s apt doubling of found and made objects; that light is also the metaphorical fire crackling through the compelling remnants of heavily annotated pages that document Ève K. Tremblay’s endeavour to memorize and recite Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as a performatively transformed copy of the written form.
Chris Kline, Divider 7, Divider 8 and Divider 9, 2012. Acrylic and aqueous dispersion pigment on poplin on wood stretcher, 60" x 60" (each). Photo by Stephanie Vegh.
Proximity and purpose, smartly orchestrated by co-curators Shannon Anderson and Jay Wilson, draw these artists together in spite of their aesthetic differences. Partheniou’s crisp forms hung in their precisely calculated symmetry are far removed from the romanticized chaos of Tremblay’s table setting of scribbled notes and quietly unnerving ceramic forms, bristling with feeling. The Closer Together Things Are achieves its greatest magic in reconciling these remarkably divergent practices through the lens of slow thinking. In bringing these artists and objects into unlikely conversation with each other, this exhibition encourages the viewer to grant these works and all between the closer attentions they deserve.
Stephanie Vegh is a visual artist, arts writer and is the Manager of Media and Communications at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery.
