Rhonda Weppler and Trevor MahovskyThere is nothing you can think that is not the moon, 2023. Image courtesy of LMCC. Photo credit: Martin Seck.
A Family-friendly event happening this Labor Day weekend, Saturday, September 3, as part of There is nothing you can think that is not the moon, a new site-specific installation by collaborative duo Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky exploring light, lostness and the act of collectively retrieving and projecting memory.
Located in a corner of The Arts Center at Governors Island’s cafe, There is nothing you can think that is not the moon surprises as a black shed housing a luminous collection of over 300 handmade glowing replicas of antique and vintage objects. This work is a variation of Twilight, the artists’ ongoing public art project, previously staged as life-scale mock antique and thrift stores on the streets of Washington, Toronto, and Orebro, Sweden. Each object is a replica in the form of a handmade lantern, assembled from photographs of objects collected and intensively documented by the artists in each city Twilight has visited. For the Governors Island installation, these lanterns appear as an island of light inside the dark storehouse that archives them. The lanterns are lit in changing patterns that organize the collection into categories such as type and city of origin. There is nothing you can think that is not the moon will be on view to the public at LMCC’s The Arts Center at Governors Island through October 1, 2023.
On the evening of Saturday, September 3, the lanterns will be given away to the public, a rare opportunity to receive an artwork and give these lanterns an extended life. The shed will then house a new collection of lanterns that have been made by the public over the course of the exhibition, during which the artists invited the public to recreate an object that they have lost or given away, and that they desire to be connected with again. Simultaneously a pivotal act of culmination and transition and a family-friendly act activity—inside and outside of the exhibition to which it is so central. The making and sharing of these lanterns is an evolving aspect of the duo’s practice where they create an economy of copying, sharing and remaking objects and memories. The parade of illuminated lanterns leaving the exhibition will create a scattering of light, reminiscent of traditional lantern festivals. Ultimately, the new lanterns, small time capsules of visitors’ memories mirroring objects that once existed, will remain on view through winter.
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